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THE THREE BRONTES 




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THE THREE BRONTES 



BY MAY SINCLAIR 




WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

STfte iSitietjsiDe "pxtii Cambribae 






COPYRIGHT, I912, BV MAY SINCLAIR 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



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PREFATORY NOTE 

My thanks are due, first and chiefly, to Mr.Clement 
K. Shorter who placed all his copyright material at 
my disposal; and to Mr. G. M. Williamson and Mr. 
Robert H. Dodd, of New York, for allowing me to 
draw so largely from the Poems of Emily Bronte'y 
published by Messrs. Dodd, Mead, and Co. in 1902; 
also to Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, the pub- 
lishers of the Complete Poems of Emily Bronte, 
edited by Mr. Shorter; and to Mr. Alfred Sutro for 
permission to use his translation of Wisdom and 
Destiny. Lastly, and somewhat late, to Mr. Arthur 
Symons for his translation from St. John of the 
Cross. If I have borrowed from him more than I 
had any right to without his leave, I hope he will 
forgive me. 

May Sinclair. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION xi 

INTRODUCTION TO SECOND EDITION . . . xvii 

THE THREE BRONTES 1 

APPENDIX I 281 

APPENDIX II 288 

INDEX 291 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



Charlotte Bronte Frontispiece 

From the original drawing {,1850) by George Richmond. 

Ha WORTH Parsonage Titlepage 

From an engraving by J. Cooper, 
Bg permission of Smith, Elder & Co. 

Rev. Patrick Bronte 8 

From a daguerreotype. 

By permission of Smith, Elder <& Co. 

Arthur Bell Nicholls ....*•. ^ . 40 

From a photograph about 1861. 

By permission of Smith, Elder & Co. 

M. CONSTANTIN HeGER 88 

From a photograph. 

By permission of Smith, Elder & Co. 

Facsiiole of A Charlotte Bronte Letter .... 156 
In the possession of Harry E. Widener, Esq., Philadelphia, and repro- 
duced by his permission. 

Facsimile of an original MS. poem by Emily Bronte 212 
In the collection of W. W. Allis, Esq., Milwaukee. 

Anne Bronte .' , . . 260 

From a drawing by Charlotte Bronte. 
By permission of Smith, Elder & Co. 

Emily Bronte 260 

From a family group painted by Branwell BrontS. 
By permission of Smith, Elder & Co, 



INTRODUCTION 

When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe sug- 
gested that I should write a short essay on *The 
Three Brontes* for Messrs. Constable's series of 
* Modern Biographies/ I agreed with some mis- 
giving. 

Yet that deed was innocent compared with what 
I have done now; and, in any case, the series af- 
forded the offender a certain shelter and protec- 
tion. But to come out like this, into the open, with 
another Bronte book, seems not only a dangerous, 
but a futile and a fatuous adventure. All I can say 
is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly never 
meant to write so long a book. 

It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things 
happened. New criticisms opened up old questions. 
When I came to look carefully into Mr. Clement 
Shorter's collection of the Complete Poems of Emily 
Bronte, I found a mass of material (its existence 
I, at any rate, had not suspected) that could not 
be dealt with in the limits of the original essay. 

The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all 
slight appreciations. None the less it has been hard 
and terrible for me to write it. Not only had I said 
nearly all that I had to say already, but I was de- 



xii INTRODUCTION 

pressed at the very start by that conviction of the 
absurdity of trying to say anything at all, after all 
that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, or Char- 
lotte Bronte. 

Anne's case, perhaps, was not so diflScult. For 
obvious reasons, Anne Bronte will always be com- 
paratively virgin soil. But it was impossible to 
write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible 
to say more of Emily than Madame Duclaux has 
said; impossible to add one single little fact to the 
vast material, so patiently amassed, so admirably 
arranged by Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it 
came to appreciation there were Mr. Theodore 
Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr* 
Birrell, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the 
ground. When it came to eulogy, after Mr. Swin-- 
burne's Note on Charlotte Bronte, neither Charlotte 
nor Emily has any need of praise. 

And on Emily Bronte, M. Maeterlinck has 
spoken the one essential, the one perfect and final 
and sufficient word. I have ' lifted ' it unblushingly ; 
for no other word comes near to rendering the 
unique, the haunting, the indestructible impression 
that she makes. 

So, because all the best things about the Brontes 
have been said already, I have had to fall back on 
the humble day-labour of clearing away some of the 
rubbish that has gathered round them. 

Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an 



N. 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

extent that it is diflScult to see her plainly through 
the mass of it. Much has been cleared away; much 
remains. Mrs. Oliphant's dreadful theories are still 
on record. The excellence of Madame Duclaux's 
monograph perpetuates her one serious error. Mr. 
Swinburne's Note immortalises his. M. Heger was 
dug up again the other day. 

It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts 
for the mere fun of laying them; and there might be 
something in it, but that really these ghosts still 
walk. At any rate many people believe in them, 
even at this time of day. M. Dimnet believes jBrmly 
that poor Mrs. Robinson was in love with Bran well 
Bronte. Some of us still think that Charlotte was 
in love with M. Heger. They cannot give him 
up any more than M. Dimnet can give up Mrs. 
Robinson. 

Such things would be utterly unimportant but 
that they tend to obscure the essential quality and 
greatness of Charlotte Bronte's genius. Because of 
them she has passed for a woman of one experience 
and of one book. There is still room for a clean 
sweep of the rubbish that has been shot here. 

In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much 
as I dislike its ungracious and ungraceful air. If I 
have been inclined to undervalue certain things — 
*the sojourn in Brussels,' for instance — which 
others have considered of the first importance, it is 
because I believe that it is always the inner life 



XIV INTRODUCTION^ 

that counts, and that with the Brontes it supremely 
counted.] 

(* If I have passed over the London period too 
lightly, it is because I judge it extraneous and ex- 
ternal. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from Char- 
lotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. 
Thackeray's dinner-party, it is because her home- 
made garments seem to suit her better. [She is more 
herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and 
kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem. 
' I may seem to have exaggerated her home- 
sickness for Haworth. It may be said that Haworth 
was by no means Charlotte's home as it was 
Emily's. I am aware that there were moments — 
hours — when she longed to get away from it. I 
have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in 
such an hour, not long after her return from Brus- 
sels, when her very flesh shrank from the thought 
of her youth gone and * nothing done'; nothing 
before her but long, empty years in Haworth. The 
fact remains that she was never happy away from 
it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly 
found itself at home. And this particular tone of 
misery and unrest disappeared from the moment 
when her genius declared itself, so that I am in- 
clined to see in it, a little personal dissatisfaction, 
if you will, but chiefly the unspeakable restlessness 
and misery of power unrecognised and suppressed. 
* Nothing done!' That was her reiterated cry. " 



INTRODUCTION xv 

Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of 
Charlotte's character, it is that the great lines that 
underlie it may be seen. In my heart I agree with 
M. Dimnet that the Brontes were not simple. All 
the same I think that his admirable portrait of 
Charlotte is spoiled by his attitude of pity for 'la 
pauvrefille,' as he persists in calling her. I think he 
dwells a shade too much on her small asperities 
and acidities, and on that 'ton de critique mesquine,* 
which he puts down to her provincialism. No 
doubt there were moments of suffering and of 
irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable 
merriment, when Charlotte lacked urbanity, but 
M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for them. 

In making war on theories I cannot hope to 
escape a countercharge of theorising. Exception 
may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effect 
of Wuthering Heights on Charlotte Bronte's genius. 
If anybody likes to fling it on the rubbish heap they 
may. I may have theorised a little too much in 
laying stress on the supernatural element in 
Wuthering Heights. It is because M. Dimnet has 
insisted too much on its brutality. I may have 
exaggerated Emily Bronte's * mysticism.' It is 
because her * paganism' has been too much in evi- 
dence. It may be said that I have no more author- 
ity for my belief that Emily Bronte was in love with 
the Absolute than other people have for theirs 
that Charlotte was in love with M. Heger. 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

' Finally, much that I have said about Emily 
Bronte's hitherto unpublished poems is pure the- 
ory. But it is theory, I think, that careful exami- 
nation of the poems will make good. I may have 
here and there given as a ^Gondal' poem what is 
not a ' Gondal ' poem at all. Still, I believe, it will 
be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, 
and not elsewhere, that we should look for the first 
germs of Wuthering Heights. The evidence only 
demonstrates in detail — what has never been 
seriously contested — that the genius of Emily 
Bronte found its sources in itself. 

^ lOth October, 1911. 



INTRODUCTION TO SECOND 
EDITION 

THE FOUR LETTERS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE 

On July 29, 1913, more than a year after the ap- 
pearance of The Three Brontes, the editor of The 
Times published, with every circumstance of adver- 
tisement, four letters of Charlotte Bronte to M. 
Constantin Heger — all that remains of the corre- 
spondence. The originals are now in the British 
Museum, the gift of M. Heger's son, Dr. Paul 
Heger, to the nation. 

One of them is torn in two and mended again. 
It might have been more decent if M. Heger had 
finished his work of destruction (if it was his work) ; 
but since he did preserve the letters and they 
passed from his keeping to his son's, no other 
course was open to Dr. Heger than in his own 
words, 'To offer them to the British Museum 
as the oflScial custodian on behalf of the British 
people.' The responsibility for their publication 
rests with the editor of The Times. 

The letters were written after Charlotte's final 
return from Brussels in February, 1844. They 
are dated respectively July 24, 1844, October 24, 
1844, January 8, 1845, and November 18 (?), 



xviii INTRODUCTION 

1845. Extracts from three of them are given by 
Mrs. Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Bronte. It 
is not known whether she had the letters in her 
hands, or whether she merely used such discreet 
selections as were given to her. Possibly Mrs. 
Gaskell may herself have made discreet omissions. 
As they now stand, unaltered and unabridged, they 
throw considerable light on that obscure and con- 
tested point of * tragic passion.' So much light 
that, personally, I think they ought never to have 
been given to the world. But, since Mr. Spielmann 
has seen fit to give them, I am bound to unsay 
much that I have said, and to admit that some pas- 
sionate element, innocent and unconscious, was, for 
all its innocence and unconsciousness, present un- 
mistakably in Charlotte Bronte's feeling for her 
* Master.' All that I wrote on this subject was 
written more than two years before the appearance 
of this additional evidence. I was then entirely 
justified in maintaining that, as far as * tragic pas- 
sion' goes, we have no evidence to prove it, and 
that what we have points all the other way.^ And 
if I said that tragic passion was, on the evidence, 
improbable, I nowhere said that it was impossible. 
Sir William Robertson NicoU, in his letter to The 
Times of July 30, says, *It has been very seri- 
ously and ably argued that Miss Bronte's regard 
for M. Heger was nothing more than an ordinary 
\ The Three Brontes, pp. 82-95. 



INTRODUCTION xix 

friendship. To suppose it went further is *' pitiful 
and silly." ... It will now be seen that those were 
right who took another view.' You seem to hear a 
certain note of triumph, as if he said, *Aha! who 
was right and who was wrong, after all?' And it 
was necessary to remind my critic that I never said 
that Miss Bronte's regard for M. Heger was no- 
thing more than an ordinary friendship, that, on 
the contrary, I was at some pains to show that it 
was a most extraordinary one. 

Well, I own that the now positively notorious 
passage about Charlotte's 'peace of mind' may, 
after all, have referred to * Miss Bronte's regard for 
M. Heger'; and that when Charlotte says that day 
and night she finds neither rest nor peace; that if 
she sleeps she is disturbed by tormenting dreams in 
which she sees her master, * always severe, always 
grave, always incensed' against her; when she says 
that the poor have not need of much to sustain 
them — they ask only for the crumbs that fall from 
the rich man's table, but that if they are refused the 
crumbs they die of hunger; and that to forbid her to 
write, to refuse to answer her would be to tear from 
her her only joy on earth, to deprive her of her last 
privilege; and that when day by day she awaits a 
letter, and when day by day disappointment comes 
to fling her back into overwhelming sorrow . . . 
then fever claims her — she loses appetite and 
sleep — she pines away, we have here the language 



XX INTRODUCTION 

of subconscious love-sickness underlying a perfer- 
vid intellectual passion. And if any room for con- 
jecture yet remains, there can be no doubt as to 
Charlotte's state of mind when she assures M. 
Heger that his 'deux discours prononces a la dis- 
tribution des prix de VAthenee royaW are worth 
the Pensees de Pascal and the complete works of 
Bernardin de Saint Pierre. 

But we have no business to read what she says. 
Her case raises a large question of literary ethics, 
of the public's 'right to know,' of the biographer's 
right to publish what was never meant for publica- 
tion. In the innumerable discussions that followed 
the appearance of these letters it was abundantly 
evident that to the ordinary decent man and to the 
ordinary decent woman Mr. Spielmann's act did 
not appear the fit and beautiful thing it appears to 
him and to Sir William Robertson NicoU. Had 
any ordinary decent man found himself with these 
letters of Charlotte Bronte's in his hands, nothing, 
I think, would have induced him to give them to 
the world. He would n't have cared a rap about 
defrauding the public of its 'right to know.' He 
would have considered that the public has no right 
to know about Charlotte Bronte dead what Char- 
lotte Bronte living would have died rather than make 
known. Of course, you have the notorious case of 
the Browning letters which may be pleaded as pre- 
cedent, but publication of even this unique corre- 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

spondence was regarded by many scrupulous people 
as more or less an outrage against perfect decency. 
Still, it may be said that if the Browning letters had 
not been given to the world the world would have 
been considerably the poorer by their loss. They 
stand as the expression of a unique and perfect 
passion. You will not find in them one word which 
either Robert Browning or his wife could have 
wished not to have written. Whether they would 
have wished them to be published is another mat- 
ter; but in no sense was Mr. Browning dishonour- 
ing his father and his mother when he gave their 
love-letters to the world. 

This cannot be said of the love-letters (if they are 
love-letters) of Charlotte Bronte. True, there is 
nothing in them dishonouring to the writer; but 
there is much which she would have wished not to 
have written. They are not the expression of a per- 
fect love, acknowledged and crowned. They are the 
pitiful, almost abject cry of a passion secret, unac- 
knowledged, incomplete, such passion as, with all 
its innocence, abhors publicity. To have published 
them simply as they stand is to have done their 
writer a gross wrong. To publish them with the 
accompanying editorial comments is to add insult 
to injury of the dead. Nor can I find in them 
any excuse for their publication. There is nothing 
unique about them. They are not, as Sir William 
Robertson NicoU thinks, * priceless.' They are the 



xxu INTRODUCTION 

expression of a very ordinary love-sickness, writh- 
ing under its veil of intellectual passion. They add 
nothing of any value to our knowledge of Charlotte 
Bronte, even supposing that we had the right to know. 
Many harsh things have been said of Mrs. Gas- 
keirs indiscretion, and it may be admitted that 
where other people were concerned she was, even 
for a biographer, more than usually indiscreet; but 
in all that related to Charlotte Bronte she was a 
perfect example of that loyalty which the living owe 
to the dead. As we do not know whether she had 
access to these letters we have no evidence for sup- 
posing that she guessed Charlotte Bronte's * se- 
cret.' But we can be pretty certain that, had she 
guessed it, she would have died rather than give it 
to the press. This inability to do the indecent thing 
may make a poor biographer and a poorer editor — 
that depends on what you consider to be the im- 
portant truth about an author. Mr. Spielmann, 
referring to Mrs. Gaskell's extracts from the let- 
ters, says rather gratuitously that *they have — 
inevitably, no doubt, at that time, for the bio- 
grapher's peculiar purpose — been garbled in a 
manner rare in a frankly and candidly conceived 
narrative,' so that *the real burden and signifi- 
cance of the correspondence are thus ingeniously 
and successfully concealed.' Now, if, as Mr. 
Spielmann admits to be possible, Mrs. Gaskell 'had 
no part in it,' if she * never had possession of the 



INTRODUCTION xxiii 

letters themselves/ she was hardly responsible for 
the garbling. What then was her peculiar purpose? 
What was it that she so ingeniously and successfully 
concealed? If, on the other hand, she did have pos- 
session of the letters, her purpose of concealment 
was plain. She suppressed, that is to say, she dis- 
creetly omitted all that she considered she was not 
at liberty to reveal. She concealed deliberately the 
secret which her sense of honour told her she had 
no right to know. 

But the modern editor is not worried by any of 
these scruples. And so, after all these years, we 
have Charlotte Bronte's poor little secret dragged 
into the daylight for all Fleet Street to gloat over. 
We have headlines in the papers : * Pathetic Heart- 
Cry,' * Hysterical,' *Six Months' Silence.' We 
have a * Vindication of Charlotte Bronte ' by Sir 
William Robertson NicoU. We have reporters in- 
terviewing biographers in the hope of extorting 
an opinion on the great discovery that, after all, 
Charlotte Bronte had a heart; we have Sir William 
Robertson Nicoll and Mr. Clement Shorter both 
declaring stoutly — almost too stoutly — as if they 
were champions of a lost cause, that they honour her 
all the more for writing these letters; we have the 
editor who gave her away protesting with a supreme 
stoutness that the secret he has exposed was en- 
tirely innocent — as if Charlotte Bronte's inno- 
cence was ever seriously called in question; we have 



Kxiv INTRODUCTION 

a tremendous display of chivalrous emotion all 
round; and we have decent average people feeling 
nothing but the sickness of disgust. 

Mr. Spielmann in his leader says (and it sounds 
very noble) : ' It is impossible for any but the stupid- 
est to feel a prurient curiosity about these emotions 
which she has so innocently laid bare ... to discuss 
them one needs a purity of thought and language 
equal to her own.' 

This would be all very well if Mr. Spielmann had 
not drawn our particular attention to the fact that 
M. Heger had scribbled the address of his boot- 
maker on the margin of Charlotte's last and most 
passionate appeal; it is more than suggested that 
M. Heger was entirely indifferent to these outpour- 
ings; we are, in fact, invited to look on while an 
unhappy woman gives herself, with every letter, 
more utterly away, and to note well the coldness 
and propriety of Monsieur. We have Mr. Spiel- 
mann's most uncalled-for editorial rendering, 
* hysteric or neurotic,' for ^exaltee,* that word with 
which M. Heger, in his * affection presque paternellej' 
is supposed to have reproved her. 

And so the real secret is out. It is not a vindica- 
tion of Charlotte Bronte at all; it is a vindication 
of M. Heger. Under all the urbanity, all the pro- 
testing, all the manly chivalry, the reiterated state- 
ments of what was never doubted, the real motive 
is apparent. Dr. Heger, tossing back to the British 



INTRODUCTION xxv 

public these torn fragments of Charlotte Bronte's 
heart, endorsed with the address of M. Heger's 
bootmaker, is not concerned with Charlotte Bronte. 
He is purely and simply defending his father. That 
bootmaker's address is to stand as a perpetual 
proof that M. Heger was innocent of any, even the 
faintest, response to Charlotte Bronte's * passion.* 
Now, nobody ever seriously suspected either 
Charlotte Bronte or her master of any attachment 
that was not wholly innocent. And but for the pub- 
hcation of these letters the question might have 
lain over till the Day of Judgment. As it is, in try- 
ing to prove that his father was indifferent to the 
verge of brutality, it seems to me that Dr. Heger 
has tried to prove too much. He has still to explain 
why the letters were preserved; why, in particular, 
that last letter lay in M. Heger's waistcoat pocket 
so handy for the bootmaker's address. Dr. Heger 
states in writing to Mr. Spielmann about the let- 
ters that 'there have never been any others than 
those I send you.' And yet Charlotte, writing in 
October, 1844, asks M. Heger if he heard from her 
at the beginning of May and 'again in the month 
of August '.f^ On the 18th of November, presum- 
ably 1845, she says 'it is now the 18th of Novem- 
ber; my last letter was dated (I think) the 18th of 
May.' In the first of the four letters, dated July 
24, 1844, she says: 'Ah, Monsieur! I once wrote 
you a letter that was less than reasonable, because 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

sorrow was in my heart. I will do so no more.' It 
may be that this letter was never sent, but there are 
still three letters unaccounted for. And as the six 
months' regulation apparently did not come into 
force in the beginning of what Dr. Heger calls the 
* one-sided correspondence,' we may presume that 
there were many more letters sent than he sup- 
poses. And we have still to wonder why Madame 
Heger disapproved of the * one-sided correspond- 
ence' so strongly that her husband had to propose 
to Charlotte that clandestine arrangement which 
Charlotte very properly refused to adopt. ^ More 
than all, we are left wondering why, if the master 
suspected his pupil of a regrettable passion for him- 
self (and it is more than suggested that he did sus- 
pect her), why on earth did he make that scene, 
described in one of Charlotte's earlier letters, when 
she was anxious to return to England, and he im- 
plored her to remain.'* That is not the conduct of 
an honourable man suspecting a woman's regret- 
table passion for himself, neither is it the conduct 
of a man altogether indifferent to that woman; 
though it may very well be that of a man inno- 
cently unaware of the nature of his own feeling and 
of hers. 

And the theory of complete indifference is irrecon- 

* According to the statement Charlotte made to Miss Lsetitia 
Wheelwright, he asked her to address her letters to the Ath6nee 
Royale instead of to his home, on the grounds that the correspond- 
ence was disagreeable to his wife. 



INTRODUCTION xxvii 

cilable with the evidence of the letters themselves. 
Can anybody whose judgment is not entirely 
warped by a theory really think that Charlotte 
Bronte, proud, reticent, self-distrustful to the last 
degree, — the Charlotte whom we know in all her 
other letters, — would have let herself go to such an 
extent, would have appealed so humbly, so almost 
abjectly, to a man whom she knew to be com- 
pletely indifferent to her? If there is nothing dis- 
honouring in Charlotte's feeling for M. Heger, if, 
with Mr. Spielmann, we are to 'admire her all the 
more for it,' why should there be anything dis- 
honouring in M. Heger's possible feeling for Char- 
lotte Bronte? Why should n't we admire him all 
the more for it? There is nothing admirable in the 
figure that he cuts on the hypothesis of complete 
indifference. It is conceivable that he should have 
seen fit to end a rather trying correspondence on 
grounds far other than indifference; that his feeling 
evaporated gradually and that he became bored 
with Charlotte's letters is also conceivable. What 
his precise feeling was nobody will ever know; but 
that he began with indifference is contrary to the 
little, the very little, that we do know. 

What is more; on the total evidence I am con- 
vinced more than ever that until the moment for 
her final departure from Brussels, until the * scene' 
that M. Heger made, Charlotte had no 'feeling' 
for him to speak of. I see no reason to modify any- 



xxviii INTRODUCTION 

thing that I have written in reference to the periods 
preceding her return to England in 1844. It was, I 
suspect, that scene that woke her up, that started 
the whole train of the longing that finds expression 
in the four letters, longing accentuated to torture 
by the loneliness and tragedy of her surroundings; 
longing that was finally appeased when her genius 
woke also and came into its own. 

However that may be, it does not, I take it, 
greatly matter. What greatly matters is the 
genius that appeased her; and the publication of 
these letters does not affect in the least my main 
contention that that genius owed nothing to her 
master, that (in spite of her brief obsession) it 
was independent of all that he could do to her or 
make her feel. The proof is the use, the deliberate, 
unimpassioned use it made of him. 

You cannot have it both ways. If you insist that 
the figure of M. Paul Emanuel is a portrait from the 
life, you may measure the extent of her independ- 
ence by her amazing mastery of the material at her 
hands. M. Heger may have been able to say, 'I 
was adored once.* But M. Paul Emanuel is the 
portrait, not of a god, but of a mortal, exposed, if 
you like, in all the charm, but also in all the weak- 
ness, the vanity, the pathos of his mortality. 

May Sinclair. 

September 25, 1913. 



THE THREE BRONTES 



THE THREE BRONTES 

It is impossible to write of the three Brontes and 
forget the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked 
village, bristling like a rampart on the clean edge 
of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, 
climbing the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the 
small oblong house, naked and grey, hemmed in on 
two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush 
with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the 
tombstones, grey and naked, are set so close that 
the grass hardly grows between. The church itself 
is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and 
its floor roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten 
dead. 

A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide 
the Parsonage from the graveyard, a few feet be- 
tween the door of the house and the door in the 
wall where its dead were carried through. But a 
path leads beyond the graveyard to *a little and 
a lone green lane,' Emily Bronte's lane that leads 
to the open moors. 

It is the genius of the Brontes that made their 
place immortal; but it is the soul of the place that 
made their genius what it is. You cannot exagger- 
ate its importance. They drank and were satur- 



4 THE THREE BRONTES 

ated with Haworth. When they left it they hun- 
gered and thirsted for it; they sickened till the hour 
of their return. They gave themselves to it with 
passion, and their works ring with the shock and 
interchange of two immortalities ^ Haworth is satur- 
ated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more 
to be disentangled from its soul than their bodies 
from its earth. All their poetry, their passion and 
their joy are there, in this place of their tragedy, vis- 
ible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless. 
K In the year eighteen - twenty the Reverend 
Patrick Bronte and his wife Maria brought their 
six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick 
Branwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where 
they were born, to Haworth. Mr. Bronte was an 
Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won, mar- 
vellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cam- 
bridge and the Church of England. Tales have 
been told of his fathers and his forefathers, peas- 
ants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in 
County Down. They seem to have been notorious 
for their energy, eccentricity, imagination, and a 
certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales 
have been told of Mr. Bronte himself, of his temper, 
his egotism, his selfishness, his fits of morose or 
savage temper. The Brontes' biographers, from 
Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux ^ to Mr. Birrell, 
have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and 

* A. Mary F. Robinson. 



THE THREE BRONTES 5 

innocent old man. It is not easy to see him very 
clearly through the multitude of tales they tell: 
how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of passion; 
how he fired off pistols in a series of fits of passion; 
how, in still gloomier and more malignant fits, he 
used to go for long solitary walks. And when you 
look into the matter you find that the silk gown 
was, after all, a cotton one, and that he only cut 
the sleeves out, and then walked into Keighley and 
brought a silk gown back with him instead; that 
when he was a young man at Drumballyroney 
he practised pistol firing, not as a safety valve for 
temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly 
sport he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is 
really no reason why a father should not take them; 
and if Mr. Bronte had insisted on accompanying 
Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct 
would have been censured just the same, and I 
think with considerably more reason. As it hap- 
pened, Mr. Bronte, rather more than most fathers, 
made companions of his children when they were 
little. This is not quite the same thing as mak- 
ing himself a companion for them, and the result 
was a terrific outburst of infant precocity; but this 
hardly justifies Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Du- 
claux. They seem to have thought that they were 
somehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily 
and Charlotte by blackening their father and their 
brother; whereas, if anything could give pain to 



6 THE THREE BRONTES 

Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, 
it would be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell 
and Madame Duclaux have done for them. 

There was injustice in all that zeal as well as 
indiscretion, for Mr. Bronte had his good points 
as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the Victo- 
rian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons 
often were; and remember that Mr. Bronte was an 
evangelical parson, and the father of Emily and 
Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate 
Jane Austens, and that he was confronted suddenly 
and without a moment's warning with Charlotte's 
fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would 
have been shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any 
child of his producing Wuthering Heights or Jane 
Eyre. Charlotte's fame would have looked to him 
exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles 
Kingsley, the least evangelical of parsons, once 
thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr. 
Bronte thought of her. He was profoundly proud 
of his daughter's genius; there is no record and no 
rumour of any criticism on his part, of any remon- 
strance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte 
to the last days of his life, when he gave her defence 
into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which confidence 
Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly. 

But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible 
to the caustic or humorous biographer. There was 
something impotently fiery in him, as if the genius 



THE THREE BRONTES 7 

of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony 
as it passed him by. He wound himself in yards 
and yards and yards of white cravat, and he wrote 
a revolutionary poem called 'Vision of Hell.' It 
is easy to make fun of his poems, but they were no 
worse, or very little worse, than his son Branwell's, 
so that he may be pardoned if he thought himself 
more important than his children. Many fathers 
of the Victorian era did. 

And he was important as a temporary vehicle of 
the wandering creative impulse. It struggled and 
strove in him and passed from him, choked in 
yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and 
strive again in Branwell and in Anne. As a rule 
the genius of the race is hostile to the creative 
impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can 
pierce through to one member of a family. In the 
Brontes it emerges at five different levels, rising 
from abortive struggle to supreme achievement — 
from Mr. Bronte to his son Branwell, from Bran- 
well to Anne, from Anne to Charlotte, and from 
Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who died, was an 
infant prodigy. 

And Mr. Bronte is important because he was the 
tool used by their destiny to keep Charlotte and 
Emily in Haworth. 

The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny 
began with their babyhood, when the mother and 
six children were brought to Haworth Parsonage 



8 THE THREE BRONTES 

and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not 
been there eighteen months before the mother sick- 
ened and died horribly of cancer. 

She had to be isolated as far as possible. The 
Parsonage house was not large, and it was built 
with an extreme and straight simplicity; two front 
rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone- 
flagged passage, a bedroom above each, and be- 
tween, squeezed into the small spare space above 
the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet 
and without a fireplace. This third room is impor- 
tant in the story of the Brontes, for, when their 
mother's illness declared itself, it was in this incred- 
ibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that 
the five little girls were packed, heaven knows how, 
and it was here that the seeds of tuberculosis were 
sown in their fragile bodies. After their mother's 
death the little fatal room was known as the child- 
ren's study (you can see, in a dreadful vision, the 
six pale little faces, pressed together, looking out 
of the window on to the graves below). It was used 
again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleep- 
ing-place shared by two, if not three, of the sisters, 
two of whom were tuberculous. 

The mother died and was buried in a vault under 
the floor of the church, not far from the windows 
of her house. Her sister. Miss Branwell, came up 
from Penzance to look after the children. You can 
see this small, middle-aged, early Victorian spin- 




>-yn^-- ^.yCetf: ^ -^n/i/^ ^^/}.cm./e- 



THE THREE BRONTES 9 

ster, exiled for ever from the sunshine of the town 
she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a 
cold and comparatively savage country that she 
unspeakably disliked. She took possession of the 
room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful 
room in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had 
to sit there with her for certain hours while she 
taught them sewing and all the early Victorian 
virtues. Their father made himself responsible for 
the rest of their education, which he conducted with 
considerable vigour and originality. Maria, the 
eldest, was the child of promise. Long before 
Maria was eleven he * conversed' with her on 'the 
leading topics of the day, with as much pleasure 
and freedom as with any grown-up person.' 

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so 
morose, found pleasure in taking his tiny children 
out on to the moors, where he entertained them 
alternately with politics and tales of brutality and 
horror. At six years old each little Bronte had its 
view of the political situation; and it was not until 
a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out 
their tender youth that their father realised how 
very young and small and delicate they were, and 
how very little, after all, he understood about a 
nursery. In a "sudden frantic distrust of the climate 
of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, 
he made up his mind to send Maria and Elizabeth 
and Charlotte and Emily to school. 



10 THE THREE BRONTES 

And there was only one school within his means, 
the Clergy Daughters' School, established at Cowan 
Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has been im- 
mortalised in Jane Eyre, together with its founder 
and patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson. There 
can be no doubt that the early Victorian virtues, 
self -repression, humility, and patience under afflic- 
tion, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And 
if the carnal nature of the Clergy Daughters re- 
sisted the militant efforts of Mr. Carus Wilson, it 
was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive 
drainage working together in an unwholesome 
valley. Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by 
a sublime antagonism to the claims of the perish- 
able body; but he seems to have pushed his cam- 
paign against the flesh a bit too far, and was sur- 
prised at his own success when, one after another, 
the extremely perishable bodies of those children 
were laid low by typhus. 

The fever did not touch the four little Brontes. 
They had another destiny. Their seed of dissolu- 
tion was sown in that small stifling room at Ha- 
worth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First 
Maria, then Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent 
home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a while with 
Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, 
watching it, and dabbling her feet and hands in the 
running water. Their doom waited for Charlotte 
and for Emily. • 



THE THREE BRONTES H 

There is no record of Elizabeth except that Hke 
Anne Bronte, she was 'gentle.' But Maria lived in 
Charlotte's passionate memory, and will live for 
ever as Helen Burns, the school - fellow of Jane 
Eyre. Of those five infant prodigies, she was the 
most prodigious. She was the first of the children 
to go down into the vault under Ha worth Church; 
you see her looking back on her sad way, a small, 
reluctant ghost, lovely, infantile, and yet maternal. 
Under her name on the flat tombstone a verse 
stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kin- 
dred: 'Be ye also ready.' 

Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters 
died. Tragedy tells at nine years old. It lived all 
her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by shock after 
shock of terror and of anguish. 

But for the next seven years, spent at the Parson- 
age without a break, tragedy was quiescent. Day 
after day, year after year passed, and nothing 
happened. And the children of the Parsonage, 
thrown on themselves and on each other, were 
exuberantly happy. They had the freedom of the 
moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as 
lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves 
created. They found out that they were not 
obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they 
could be, and they were, anything they chose, from 
the Duke of Wellington down to citizens of Verdo- 
polis. For a considerable number of years they 



12 THE THREE BRONTES 

were the 'Islanders.' *It was in 1827' (Charlotte, 
at thirteen, records the date with gravity — it was 
so important) *that our plays were established: 
Young Men, June 1826; Our Fellows, July 1827; 
The Islanders, December 1827. These are our three 
great plays that are not kept secret.' 

But there were secret plays, Emily's and Char- 
lotte's; and these you gather to be the shy and 
solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte's genius. 
They seem to have required absolutely no impul- 
sion from without. The difficult thing for these 
small children was to stop writing. Their fire con- 
sumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, 
fragile as ashes. And yet they were not, they could 
not have been, the sedentary, unwholesome little 
creatures they might seem to be. The girls were 
kept hard at work with their thin arms, brushing 
carpets, dusting furniture, and making beds. And 
for play they tramped the moors with their brother; 
they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the 
sun, the moon, the stars, and the winds knew them; 
and it is of these fierce, radiant, elemental things 
that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women 
before them had ever written. Conceive the vital- 
ity and energy implied in such a life; and think, 
if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims 
of the lust of literature. It was from the impres- 
sions they took in those seven years that their 
immortality was made. 



THE THREE BRONTES 13 

And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went 
to school again, that school of Miss Wooler's at 
Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, *a silent, 
weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window.' 
She was then sixteen. 

Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's 
school as a teacher. 

In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School 
there are two immortal entries : — 

'Charlotte Bronte. . . . Left school, June 1st, 
1825 — Governess.' 

* Emily Bronte. . . . Left, June 1st, 1825. Sub- 
sequent career — Governess.' 

They did not question the arrangement. They 
were not aware of any other destiny. They never 
doubted that the boy, Branwell, was the child of 
promise, who was to have a glorious career. In 
order that he should have it the sisters left Ha worth 
again and again, forcing themselves to the exile 
that destroyed them, and the work they hated. 
It was Charlotte and Anne who showed themselves 
most courageous and determined in the terrible 
adventure; Emily, who was courage and determina- 
tion incarnate, failed. Homesickness had become 
a disease with them, an obsession, almost a mad- 
ness. They longed with an immitigable longing for 
their Parsonage-house, their graveyard, and their 
moors. Emily was consumed by it; Anne lan- 
guished; Charlotte was torn between it and her 
passion for knowledge. 



14 THE THREE BRONTES 

She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a 
pupil, and Emily nearly died of it. She sent Emily 
home, and little Anne, the last victim, took Emily's 
place. She and Charlotte went with the school 
when it was removed to Dewsbury Moor. Then 
Emily, who had nearly died of Roe Head, shamed 
by Charlotte's and Anne's example, went to Hali- 
fax as a teacher in Miss Patchett's Academy for 
Young Ladies. She was at Halifax — Halifax of all 
places — for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. 
And after that Charlotte and Anne set out on their 
careers as nursery-governesses. 

It was all that they considered themselves fit for. 
Anne went to a Mrs. Ingham at Blake Hall, where 
she was homesick and miserable. Charlotte went 
to the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skip ton, 
where ' one of the pleasantest afternoons I spent — 
indeed, the only one at all pleasant — was when 
Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and 
I had orders to follow a little way behind.' You 
have an impression of years of suffering endured 
at Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte was 
there hardly three months — May, June, July, 
eighteen-thirty-nine. 

And most of the time their brother Branwell was 
either at Bradford or at Ha worth, dreaming of 
greatness, and drinking at the Black Bull. The 
Black Bull stands disastrously near to the Parson- 
age, at the corner of the churchyard, with its par- 



THE THREE BRONTES 15 

lour windows looking on the graves. Branwell was 
the life and soul of every party of commercial 
travellers that gathered there. Conviviality took 
strange forms at Haworth. It had a Masonic Lodge 
of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave- 
digger, for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at 
one and the same time secretary to the Three 
Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. 
When he was not entertaining bagmen, he was 
either at Bradford painting bad portraits, or at 
Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatally 
fluent verses, and writing hysterical letters to the 
editor of Blackwood's Magazine. One formidable 
letter (the third he sent) is headed in large letters : 
*Sir, read what I write.' It begins: *And would to 
Heaven you would believe in me, for then you 
would attend to me and act upon it,' and ends: 
*You lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God 
grant you may get one in Patrick Branwell Bronte.' 
Another followed, headed, 'Sir, read now at last,' 
and ending, 'Condemn not unheard.' In a final 
letter Branwell inquires whether Mr. Blackwood 
thinks his magazine *so perfect that no addition 
to its power would be either possible or desirable,' 
and whether it is pride that actuates him, or cus- 
tom, or prejudice? and conjures him: 'Be a man, 
sir!' 

Nothing came of it. Mr. Blackwood refused to 
be a man. 



16 THE THREE BRONTES 

Yet Branwell had his chance. He went to Lon- 
don, but nothing came of it. He went to Bradford 
and had a studio there, but nothing came of it. 
He lived for a brief period . In a small provincial 
Bohemia. It was his best and happiest period, but 
nothing came of it beyond the letters and the reams 
of verse he sent to Leyland the sculptor. There 
was something brilliant and fantastic about the 
boy that fascinated Leyland. But a studio costs 
money, and Branwell had to give his up and go 
back to Haworth and the society of John Brown 
the stone-mason and grave-digger. That John 
Brown was a decent fellow you gather from the 
fact that on a journey to Liverpool he had charge 
of Branwell, when Branwell was at his worst. They 
had affectionate names for each other. Branwell 
is the Philosopher, John Brown is the Old Knave 
of Trumps. The whole trouble with Branwell was 
that he could not resist the temptation of impress- 
ing the grave-digger. He himself was impressed by 
the ironic union in the Worshipful Master of con- 
viviality and a sinister occupation. 

A letter of Branwell's (preserved by the grave- 
digger in a quaint devotion to his friend's memory) 
has achieved an immortality denied to his 'Effu- 
sions.' Nothing having come of the * Effusions,' 
Branwell, to his infinite credit, followed his sisters' 
example, and became tutor with a Mr. Postle- 
thwaite. The irony of his situation pleased him, and 



THE THREE BRONTES 17 

he wrote to the Old Knave of Trumps thus: *I took 
a half-year's farewell of old friend whisky at Kendal 
on the night after I left. There was a party of 
gentlemen at the Royal Hotel, and I joined them. 
We ordered in supper and whisky-toddy as hot as 
hell ! They thought I was a physician, and put me 
in the chair. I gave several toasts that were washed 
down at the same time till the room spun round and 
the "candles danced in our eyes. ... I found my- 
self in bed next morning with a bottle of porter, 
a glass, and a corkscrew beside me. Since then I 
have not tasted anything stronger than milk-and- 
water, nor, I hope, shall, till I return at midsum- 
mer; when we will see about it. I am getting as fat 
as Prince William at Springhead, and as godly as 
his friend Parson Winterbotham. My hand shakes 
no longer. I ride to the banker's at Ulverston with 
Mr. Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea, and talking 
scandal with old ladies. As for the young ones! I 
have one sitting by me just now — fair-faced, blue- 
eyed, dark - haired, sweet eighteen — she little 
thinks the devil is so near her ! ' — and a great deal 
more in the same silly, post-Byronic strain. 

In his postscript Bran well says: *0f course you 
won't show this letter,' and of course John Brown 
showed it all round. It was far too good to be kept 
to himself; John Brown's brother thought it so 
excellent that he committed it to memory. This 
was hard on Branwell. The letter is too fantastic 



18 THE THREE BRONTES 

to be used against him as evidence of his extreme 
depravity, but it certainly lends some support to 
Mrs. Gaskell's statements that he had begun al- 
ready, at two-and-twenty, to be an anxiety to his 
family. Haworth, that schooled his sisters to a 
high and beautiful austerity, was bad for Branwell. 

He stayed with Mr. Postlethwaite for a month 
longer than Charlotte stayed with the Sidgwicks. 

Then, for a whole year, Charlotte was at Ha- 
worth, doing housemaid's work, and writing poems, 
and amusing herself at the expense of her father's 
curates. She had begun to find out the extent to 
which she could amuse herself. She also had had 
'her chance.' She had refused two offers of mar- 
riage, preferring the bondage and the exile that 
she knew. Nothing more exhilarating than a pro- 
posal that you have rejected. Those proposals did 
Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she 
wanted. She found it (for a year) happiness enough 
to be at Haworth, to watch the long comedy of the 
curates as it unrolled itself before her. She saw 
most things that summer (her twenty-fifth) with 
the ironic eyes of the comic spirit, even Branwell. 
She wrote to Miss Nussey: *A distant relation of 
mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek 
his fortune in the wild, wandering, knight-errant- 
like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester 
Railroad.' And she goes on to chaff Miss Nussey 
about Celia Amelia, the curate. ' I know Mrs. Ellen 



' THE THREE BRONTES 19 

is burning with eagerness to hear something about 
W. Weightman, whom she adores in her heart, and 
whose image she cannot efface from her memory.' 

Some of her critics, including Mrs. Oliphant (far 
less indulgent than the poor curates who forgave 
her nobly), have grudged Charlotte her amuse- 
ment. There is nothing, from her fame downwards, 
that Mrs. Oliphant did not grudge her. Mr. Birrell 
sternly disapproves; even Mr. Swinburne, at the 
height of his panegyric, is put off. Perhaps Char- 
lotte's humour was not her most attractive quality; 
but nobody seems to have seen the pathos and the 
bravery of it. Neither have they seen that Miss 
Nussey was at the bottom of its worst develop- 
ment, the * curate-baiting.' Miss Nussey used to go 
and stay at Ha worth for weeks at a time. Ha worth 
was not amusing, and Miss Nussey had to be 
amused. All this school-girlish jesting, the perpet- 
ual and rather tiresome banter, was a playing down 
to Miss Nussey. It was a kind of tender 'baiting' 
of Miss Nussey, who had tried on several occa- 
sions to do Charlotte good. And it was the natural 
healthy rebound of the little Irish gamine that 
lived in Charlotte Bronte, bursting with clever- 
ness and devilry. I, for my part, am glad to think 
that for one happy year she gave it full vent. 

She was only twenty-four. Even as late as the 
mid- Victorian era to be twenty-four and unmarried 
was to be middle-aged. But (this cannot be too 



20 THE THREE BRONTES 

much insisted on) Charlotte Bronte was the revo- 
lutionist who changed all that. She changed it not 
only in her novels but in her person. Here again 
she has been misrepresented. There are no words 
severe enough for Mrs. Oliphant's horrible portrait 
of her as a plain-faced, lachrymose, middle-aged 
spinster, dying, visibly, to be married, obsessed 
for ever with that idea, for ever whining over the 
frustration of her sex. What Mrs. Oliphant, *the 
married woman,' resented in Charlotte Bronte, 
over and above her fame, was Charlotte's unsanc- 
tioned knowledge of the mysteries, her intrusion 
into the veiled places, her unbaring of the virgin 
heart. That her genius was chiefly concerned in it 
does not seem to have occurred to Mrs. Oliphant, 
any more than it occurred to her to notice the im- 
pression that Charlotte Bronte made on her male 
contemporaries. It is doubtful if one of them 
thought of her as Mrs. Oliphant would have us 
think. They gave her the tender, deferent affection 
they would have given to a charming child. Even 
the very curates saw in her, to their amazement, 
the spirit of undying youth. Small as a child, and 
fragile, with soft hair and flaming eyes, and always 
the pathetic, appealing plainness of a plain child, 
with her child's audacity and shyness, her sudden, 
absurd sallies and retreats, she had a charm made 
the more piquant by her assumption of austerity. 
George Henry Lewes was gross and flippant, and 



THE THREE BRONTES 21 

he could not see it; Bran well's friend, Mr. Grundy, 
was Branwell's friend and he missed it. Mrs. Oli- 
phant ranges herself with Mr. Grundy and George 
Henry Lewes. 

But Charlotte's fun was soon over, and she be- 
came a nursery-governess again at Mrs. White's, 
of Rawdon. Anne was with Mrs. Robinson, at 
Thorp Green. 

Emily was at Haworth, alone. 

That was in eighteen -forty -one. Years after 

their death, a little black box was found containing 

four tiny scraps of paper, undiscovered by Charlotte 

when she burnt every line left by Anne and Emily 

except their poems. Two of these four papers were 

written by Emily, and two by Anne; each sister 

keeping for the other a record of four years. They 

begin in eighteen - forty - one. Emily was then 

twenty -four and Anne a year and a half younger. 

Nothing can be more childlike, more naif. Emily 

heads her diary : — 

A PAPER to be opened 

when Anne is 

25 years old, 

or my next birthday after 

if 

all be well. 

Emily Jane Bronte. July the 30th, 1841. 

She says: *It is Friday evening, near nine o'clock 
— wild rainy weather. I am seated in the dining- 
room, having just concluded tidying our desk- 



22 THE THREE BRONTES 

boxes, writing this document. Papa is in the par- 
lour — aunt upstairs in her room. . . . Victoria 
and Adelaide are ensconced in the peat -house. 
Keeper is in the kitchen — Hero in his cage.' 

Having accounted for Victoria and Adelaide, the 
tame geese, Keeper, the dog, and Hero, the hawk, 
she notes the whereabouts of Charlotte, Branwell, 
and Anne. And then (with gravity) : 

*A scheme is at present in agitation for setting 
us up in a school of our own.' . . . 'This day four 
years I wonder whether we shall be dragging on in 
our present condition or established to our hearts' 
content.' 

Then Emily dreams her dream. 

* I guess that on the time appointed for the open- 
ing of this paper we, i.e. Charlotte, Anne, and I, 
shall be all merrily seated in our own sitting-room 
in some pleasant and flourishing seminary, hav- 
ing just gathered in for the midsummer holiday. 
Our debts will be paid off and we shall have cash in 
hand to a considerable amount. Papa, aunt, and 
Branwell, will either have been or be coming to 
visit us.' 

And Anne writes with equal innocence (it is 
delicious, Anne's diary): *Four years ago I was at 
school. Since then I have been a governess at Blake 
Hall, left it, come to Thorp Green, and seen the sea 
and York Minster.' . . . *We have got Keeper, 
got a sweet little cat and lost it, and also got a 



THE THREE BRONTES 23 

hawk. Got a wild goose which has flown away, and 
three tame ones, one of which has been killed.' 

It is Emily who lets out the dreary secret of the 
dream — the debts which could not be paid : prob- 
ably Branwell's. 

But the * considerable amount of cash in hand* 
was to remain a dream. Nothing came of Bran- 
well's knight-errantry. He muddled the accounts 
of the Leeds and Manchester Railroad and was sent 
home. It was not good for Branwell to be a clerk 
at a lonely wayside station. His disaster, which 
they much exaggerated, was a shock to the three 
sisters. They began to have misgivings, premoni- 
tions of Branwell's destiny. 

And from Mrs. White's at Rawdon, Charlotte 
sends out cry after desolate cry. Again we have an 
impression of an age of exile, but really the exile 
did not last long, not much longer than Emily's 
imprisonment in the Academy for Young Ladies, 
nothing like so long as Anne's miserable term. 

The exile really began in 'forty -two, when Char- 
lotte and Emily left England for Brussels and 
Madame Heger's Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the 
Rue d'Isabelle. It is supposed to have been the 
turning point in Charlotte's career. She was then 
twenty-six, Emily twenty -four. 

It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's 
supreme ambition at that time was to keep a school, 
a school of her own, like her friend Miss Wooler. 



24 THE THREE BRONTES 

There was a great innocence and humility in Char- 
lotte. She was easily taken in by any of those 
veiled, inimical spectres of the cross-roads that 
youth mistakes for destiny. She must have refused 
to look too closely at the apparition; it was enough 
for her that she saw in it the divine thing — lib- 
erty. Her genius was already struggling in her. 
She had begun to feel under her shoulders the pain- 
ful piercing of its wings. Her friend, Mary Taylor, 
had written to her from Brussels telling her of pic- 
tures and cathedrals. Charlotte tells how it woke 
her up. *I hardly know what swelled in my breast 
as I read her letter: such a vehement impatience of 
restraint and steady work; such a strong wish for 
wings — wings such as wealth can furnish; such an 
urgent desire to see, to know, to learn; something 
internal seemed to expand bodily for a minute. 
I was tantalised by the consciousness of faculties 
unexercised.' But Charlotte's * wings' were not 
*such as wealth can furnish.' They were to droop, 
almost to die, in Brussels. 

■ Emily was calmer. Whether she mistook it for 
her destiny or not, she seems to have acquiesced 
when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at the 
cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte 
through the 'streaming and starless darkness' that 
took them to Brussels. The rest she endured with 
a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from 
her letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. 



THE THREE BRONTES 25 

Heaven only knows what it must have been to 
Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion for 
knowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her 
psychological interest in M. Heger and his wife, 
Charlotte hardly came out of it with her soul alive. 
But Emily was not interested in M. Heger nor in 
his wife, nor in his educational system. She thought 
his system was no good and told him so. What she 
thought of his wife is not recorded. 

Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old 
aunt. Miss Branwell, died. That was destiny, the 
destiny that was so kind to Emily. It sent her and 
her sister back to Haworth and it kept her there. 
Poor Anne was fairly launched on her career; she 
remained in her * situation,' and somebody had to 
look after Mr. Bronte and the house. Things were 
going badly and sadly at the Parsonage. Branwell 
was there, drinking; and Charlotte was even afraid 
that her father also — sometimes — perhaps — 

She left Emily to deal with them and went back 
to Brussels as a pupil teacher, alone. She went in 
an agony of self-reproach, desiring more and more 
knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible 
possession of the German language, and wondering 
whether it were right to satisfy that indomitable 
craving. By giving utterance to this self-reproach, 
so passionate, so immense, so disproportioned to 
the crime, the innocent Charlotte laid herself open 
to an unjust suspicion. Innocent and unaware she 



26 THE THREE BRONTES 

went, and — it is her own word — she was * pun- 
ished ' for it. 

Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness 
could compare with that last year of solitary and 
unmitigated exile. It is supposed, even by the char- 
itable, that whatever M. Heger did or did not do 
for Charlotte, he did everything for her genius. 
As a matter of fact, it was in Brussels that she 
suffered the supreme and ultimate abandonment. 
She no longer felt the wild unknown thing stirring 
in her with wings. So little could M. Heger do for 
it that it refused to inhabit the same house with 
him. She records the result of that imprisonment a 
few weeks after her release: * There are times now 
when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings, 
except a few friendships and affections, are changed 
from what they used to be; something in me, which 
used to be enthusiasm, is tamed down and broken.' 

In Brussels surely enlightenment must have 
come to her. She must have seen, as Emily saw, 
that in going that way, she had mistaken and done 
violence to her destiny. 

She went back to Haworth where it waited for 
her, where it had turned even the tragedy of her 
family to account. Everything conspired to keep 
her there. The school was given up. She tells why. 
*It is on papa's account; he is now, as you know, 
getting old, and it grieves me to tell you that he is 
losing his sight. I have felt for some months that 



THE THREE BRONTES 27 

I ought not to be away from him; and I feel now 
that it would be too selfish to leave (at least as long 
as Branwell and Anne are absent) to pursue selfish 
interests of my own. With the help of God I will 
try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait.* 

And with the help of God she waited. 

There are three significant entries in Emily's 
sealed paper for eighteen-forty-five. *Now I don't 
desire a school at all, and none of us have any great 
longing for it.' *I am quite contented for myself 
. . . seldom or never troubled with nothing to do 
and merely desiring that everybody could be as 
comfortable as myself and as undesponding, and 
then we should have a very tolerable world of it.' 
* I have plenty of work on hand, and writing. . . .' 
This, embedded among details of an incomparable 
innocence: * We have got Flossy; got and lost Tiger; 
lost the hawk, Hero, which, with the geese, was 
given away, and is doubtless dead.' 

And Anne, as naive as a little nun, writes in her 
sealed paper: 'Emily is upstairs ironing. I am sit- 
ting in the dining-room in the rocking-chair before 
the fire with my feet on the fender. Papa is in the 
parlour. Tabby and Martha are, I think, in the 
kitchen. Keeper and Flossy are, I do not know 
where. Little Dick is hopping in his cage.' And 
then, 'Emily ... is writing some poetry. ... I 
wonder what it is about?' 

That is the only clue to the secret. These child- 



28 THE THREE BRONTES 

like diaries are full of the *Gondal Chronicles/^ 
an interminable fantasy in which for years Em- 
ily collaborated with Anne. They flourished the 
*Gondal Chronicles' in each other's faces, with 
positive bravado, trying to see which could keep 
it up the longer. Under it all there was a mys- 
tery; for, as Charlotte said of their old play, 
'Best plays were secret plays,' and the sisters kept 
their best hidden. And then suddenly the *Gon- 
dal Chronicles' were dropped, the mystery broke 
down. All three of them had been writing poems; 
they had been writing poems for years. Some of 
Emily's dated from her first exile at Roe Head. 
Most of Anne's sad songs were sung in her house of 
bondage. From Charlotte, in her Brussels period, 
not a line. 

But at Haworth, in the years that followed her 
return and found her free, she wrote nearly all her 
maturer poems (none of them were excessively ma- 
ture) : she wrote The Professor, and close upon The 
Professor, Jane Eyre, In the same term that found 
her also, poor child, free, and at Haworth, Anne 
wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

And Emily wrote Wuthering Heights. 

They had found their destiny — at Haworth. 

Every conceivable theory has been offered to 
account for the novels that came so swiftly and 
^ See injra, pp. 224 to 243. 



THE THREE BRONTES 29 

incredibly from these three sisters. It has been 
said that they wrote them merely to pay their debts 
when they found that poems did not pay. It would 
be truer to say that they wrote them because it was 
their destiny to write them, and because their hour 
had come, and that they published them with the 
dimmest hope of a return. 

Before they knew where they were, Charlotte 
found herself involved in what she thought was a 
business-like and masculine correspondence with 
publishing firms. 

The Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, 
appeared first, and nothing happened. The Pro- 
fessor travelled among publishers, and nothing 
happened. Then, towards the end of the fourth 
year there came Jane Eyre, and Charlotte was 
famous. 

But not Emily, Wuthering Heights appeared 
also, and nothing happened. It was bound in the 
same volume with Anne's humble tale. Its light- 
ning should have scorched and consumed Agnes 
Grey, but nothing happened. Ellis and Acton Bell 
remained equals in obscurity, recognised only by 
their association with the tremendous Currer. 
When it came to publishing The Tenant of Wildfell 
Hall, and association became confusion, Charlotte 
and Anne went up to London to prove their sepa- 
rate identity. Emily stayed at Haworth, superbly 
indifferent to the proceedings. She was unseen, 



30 THE THREE BRONTES 

undreamed of, unrealised, and in all her life she 
made no sign. 

But, in a spirit of reckless adventure, Charlotte 
and Anne walked the seven miles to Keighley on a 
Friday evening in a thunder-storm, and went up 
by the night train. On the Saturday morning they 
appeared in the office at Cornhill to the amaze- 
ment of Mr. George Smith and Mr. Williams. With 
childlike innocence and secrecy they hid in the 
Chapter Coffee-house in Paternoster Row, and 
called themselves the Misses Brown. When enter- 
tainment was offered them, they expressed a wish 
to hear Dr. Croly preach. They did not hear him; 
they only heard The Barber of Seville at Covent 
Garden. They tried, with a delicious solemnity, to 
give the whole thing an air of business, but it was 
really a breathless, infantile escapade of three days. 
Three days out of four years. 

And in those four years poor Branwell's destiny 
found him also. After many minor falls and peni- 
tences and relapses, he seemed at length to have 
settled down. He had been tutor for two and a 
half years with the Robinsons at Thorp Green, in 
the house where Anne was a governess. He was 
happy at first; an onimous happiness. Then Anne 
began to be aware of something. 

Mr. Birrell has said rather unkindly that he has 
no use for this young man. Nobody had any use 



THE THREE BRONTES 31 

for him. Not the editors to whom he used to write 
so hysterically. Not the Leeds and Manchester 
Railway Company. And certainly not Mrs. Rob- 
inson, the lady for whom he conceived that insane 
and unlawful passion which has been made to loom 
so large in the lives of the Brontes. After all the 
agony and indignation that has gathered round 
this episode, it is clear enough now, down to the 
last sordid details. The feverish, degenerate, 
utterly irresponsible Branwell not only declared 
his passion, but persuaded himself, against the 
evidence of his senses, that it was returned. The 
lady (whom he must have frightened horribly) told 
her husband who instantly dismissed Branwell. 

Branwell never got over it. 

He was destined to die young, and, no doubt, if 
there had been no Mrs. Robinson, some other pas- 
sion would have killed him. Still, it may be said 
with very little exaggeration that he died of it. He 
had not hitherto shown any signs of tuberculosis. 
It may be questioned whether without this predis- 
posing cause he would have developed it. He had 
had his chance to survive. He had never been 
packed, like his sisters, first one of five, then one of 
three, into a closet not big enough for one. But he 
drank harder after the Robinson affair than he had 
ever drunk before, and he added opium to drink. 
Drink and opium gave frightful intensity to the 
hallucination of which in a sense he died. 



32 THE THREE BRONTES 

It took him more than three years, from July, 
eighteen - forty - five, the date of his dismissal, to 
September, eighteen -forty -eight, the date of his 
death. 

The Incumbent of Haworth has been much 
blamed for his son's shortcomings. He has been 
charged with first spoiling the boy, and then neglect- 
ing him. In reality his only error (a most unusual 
one in an early Victorian father) was that he believed 
in his son's genius. When London and the Royal 
Academy proved beyond him he had him taught 
at Bradford. He gave him a studio there. He had 
already given him an education that at least 
enabled him to obtain tutorships, if not to keep 
them. The Parsonage must have been a terrible 
place for Branwell, but it was not in the Vicar's 
power to make it more attractive than the Bull Inn. 
Branwell was not a poet like his sisters, and moors 
meant nothing to him. To be sure, when he went 
into Wales and saw Penmaenmawr, he wrote a 
poem about it. But the poem is not really about 
Penmaenmawr. It is all about Branwell; Pen- 
maenmawr is Branwell, a symbol of his colossal 
personality and of his fate. For Branwell was a 
monstrous egoist. He was not interested in his 
sisters or in his friends, or really in Mrs. Robinson. 
He was interested only in himself. What could a 
poor vicar do with a son like that? There was 
nothing solid in Branwell that you could take hold 



THE THREE BRONTES 83 

of and chastise. There was nothing you could 
appeal to. His affection for his family was three- 
fourths sentimentalism. Still, what the Vicar could 
do he did do. When Branwell was mad with drink 
and opium he never left him. There is no story 
more grim and at the same time more poignant and 
pathetic than that which Mrs. Gaskell tells of his 
devotion to his son in this time of the boy's ruin. 
Branwell slept in his father's room. He would doze 
all day, and rage all night, threatening his father's 
life. In the morning he would go to his sisters and 
say: *The poor old man and I have had a terrible 
night of it. He does his best, the poor old man ! but 
it is all over with me.' He died in his father's arms 
while Emily and little Anne looked on. 
f. They say that he struggled to his feet and died 
standing, to prove the strength of his will; but some 
biographer has robbed him of this poor splendour. 
It was enough for his sisters — and it should be 
enough for anybody — that his madness left him 
with the onset of his illness, and that he went from 
them penitent and tender, purified by the mystery 
and miracle of death. 

That was on Sunday, the twenty-fourth of Sep- 
tember. From that day Emily sickened. She 
caught cold at Branwell's funeral. On September, 
the thirtieth, she was in church listening to his 
funeral sermon. After that, she never crossed the 
threshold of the Parsonage till in December her 



34 THE THREE BRONTES 

dead body was carried over it, to lie beside her 
brother under the church floor. 

In October, a week or two after Bran well's death, 
Charlotte wrote: 'Emily has a cold and cough at 
present.' * Emily's cold and cough are very obstin- 
ate. I fear she has pain in her chest, and I some- 
times catch a shortness in her breathing when she 
has moved at all quickly.' In November: 'I told 
you Emily was ill, in my last letter. She has not 
rallied yet. She is very ill ... I think Emily 
seems the nearest thing to my heart in all the world.' 
And in December: 'Emily suffers no more from 
pain or weakness now . . . there is no Emily in 
time, or on earth now. . . . We are very calm at 
present. Why should we be otherwise .^^ The an- 
guish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of 
the pains of death is gone by: the funeral day is 
past. We feel she is at peace. No need to tremble 
for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does 
not feel them. She died in a time of promise. . . . 
But it is God's will, and the place where she has 
gone is better than that which she has left.' 

It could have been hardly daylight on the moors 
the morning when Charlotte went out to find that 
last solitary sprig of heather which she laid on 
Emily's pillow for Emily to see when she awoke. 
Emily's eyes were so drowsed with death that she 
could not see it. And yet it could not have been 
many hours later when a fire was lit in her bed- 



THE THREE BRONTES 35 

room, and she rose and dressed herself. Madame 
Duclaux ^ tells how she sat before the fire, combing 
her long, dark hair, and how the comb dropped 
from her weak fingers, and fell under the grate. 
And how she sat there in her mortal apathy; and 
how, when the servant came to her, she said dream- 
ily: * Martha, my comb's down there; I was too 
weak to stoop and pick it up.' 

Sh^ dragged herself down to the sitting-room, 
and died there, about two o'clock. She must have 
had some horror of dying in that room of death 
overhead; for, at noon, when the last pains seized 
her, she refused to be taken back to it. Unterrified, 
indomitable, driven by her immortal passion for 
life, she fought terribly. Death took her as she 
tried to rise from the sofa and break from her 
sisters' arms that would have laid her there. Pro- 
foundly, piteously alienated, she must have felt 
that Anne and Charlotte were in league with death ; 
that they fought with her and bound her down; and 
that in her escape from them she conquered. 

Another month and Anne sickened. As Emily 
died of Branwell's death, so Emily's death hast- 
ened Anne's. Charlotte wrote in the middle of 
January: *I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, 
nor can I say she is better. . . . The days pass in a 
slow, dull march: the nights are the test; the sud- 
den wakings from restless sleep, the revived know- 
^ * Emily Bronte ' : Eminent Women Series. 



36 THE THREE BRONTES 

ledge that one lies in her grave, and another, not 
at my side, but in a separate and sick bed.' And 
again in March: 'Anne's decline is gradual and 
fluctuating, but its nature is not doubtful.' And 
yet again in April: *If there were no hope beyond 
this world . . . Emily's fate, and that which 
threatens Anne, would be heartbreaking. I cannot 
forget Emily's death-day; it becomes a more fixed, 
a darker, a more frequently recurring idea in my 
mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was 
torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though reso- 
lute, out of a happy life/ 

^3 Mrs. Oliphant has censured Emily Bronte for the 
manner of her dying. She might as well have cen- 
sured Anne for drawing out the agony. For Anne 
was gentle to the end, utterly submissive. She gave 
death no trouble. She went, with a last hope, to 
Scarborough, and died there at the end of May. 
She was buried at Scarborough, where she lies 
alone. It is not easy to believe that she had no 
'preference for place,' but there is no doubt that 
even to that choice of her last resting-place she 
would have submitted — gently. 

'I got here a little before eight o'clock. All was 
clean and bright, waiting for me. Papa and the 
servants were well, and all received me with an 
affection that should have consoled. The dogs 
seemed in strange ecstasy. I am certain that they 
regarded me as the harbinger of others. The dumb 



THE THREE BRONTES 37 

creatures thought that as I was returned, those 
who had been so long absent were not far behind. 
... I felt that the house was all silent, the rooms 
were all empty. I remembered where the three 
were laid — in what narrow, dark dwellings — 
never more to reappear on earth. ... I cannot 
help thinking of their last days, remembering their 
sufferings, and what they said and did, and how 
they* looked in mortal affliction. . . . To sit in a 
lonely room, the clock ticking loud through a still 
house — ' Charlotte could see nothing else before 
her. 

It was July. She had come home after a visit to 
Miss Nussey. 

In that month she wrote that chapter of Shirley 
which is headed *The Valley of the Shadow.' The 
book (begun more than eighteen months before) 
fairly quivers with the shock that cut it in two. 

It was finished somewhere in September of that 
year of Anne's death. Charlotte went up to Lon- 
don. She saw Thackeray. She learned to accept 
the fact of her celebrity. 

Somehow the years passed, the years of Char- 
lotte's continuous celebrity, and of those literary 
letters that take so disproportionate a part in her 
correspondence that she seems at last to have for- 
gotten; she seems to belong to the world rather 
than to Haworth. And the world seems full of 
Charlotte; the world that had no place for Emily. 



38 THE THREE BRONTES 

And yet Wuthering Heights had followed Shirley. 
It had been republished with Charlotte's introduc- 
tion, her vindication of her sister. It brought more 
fame for Charlotte, but none — yet — for Emily. 
f Two years later came Villette. Charlotte went 
up to London a third time and saw Thackeray 
again. And there were more letters, the admirable 
but slightly self-conscious letters of the literary 
woman, artificially assured. They might deceive 
you, only the other letters, the letters to Ellen 
Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life 
of Charlotte Bronte's soul that had in it nothing of 
the literary taint. You see in them how, body and 
soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will 
not let her go. 

Nor does she desire now to be let go. Her life at 
Haworth is part of Emily's life; it partakes of the 
immortality of the unforgotten dead. London and 
Thackeray, the Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss 
Martineau, Sir John and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, 
her celebrity and the little train of cheerful, un- 
familiar circumstances, all these things sink into 
insignificance beside it. They are all extraneous 
somehow, and out of keeping. Nothing that her 
biographers have done (when they have done their 
worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her 
life gives of unity, of fitness, of profound and tragic 
harmony. It was Mrs. Gaskell's sense of this effect 
that made her work a masterpiece. 



THE THREE BRONTES 39 

And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father's 
curate, Arthur Nicholls, the marriage that cut 
short her life, and made an end of her celebrity, 
Charlotte Bronte followed before all things her in- 
stinct for fitness, for unity, for harmony. It was 
exquisitely in keeping. It did no violence to her 
memories, her simplicities and sanctities. It found 
her in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet one 
with all that was passionate in her and undying. 
She went to it one morning in May, all white and 
drooping, in her modest gown and that poor little 
bridal bonnet with its wreath of snowdrops, sym- 
bolic of all the timidities, the reluctances, the cold 
austerities of spring roused in the lap of winter, 
and yet she found in it the secret fire of youth. She 
went to it afraid; and in her third month of mar- 
riage she still gives a cry wrung from the memory 
of her fear. 'Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn 
and strange and perilous thing for a woman to be- 
come a wife.' 

And yet for all that, after London, after fame 
and friendships in which her dead had no share, 
her marriage was not the great departure; it was 
the great return. It was the outcome of all that 
had gone before it ; the fruit of painful life, which is 
recognition, acceptance, the final trust in destiny. 
There were to be no more false starts, no more 
veiled ghosts of the cross-roads, pointing the dis- 
astrous way. 



40 THE THREE BRONTES 

And in its abrupt and pitiful end her life rang 
true; it sustained the tragic harmony. It was the 
fulfilment of secret prophecies, forebodings, pre- 
monitions, of her reiterated *It was not to be.' 
You may say that in the end life cheated and be- 
trayed her. 

And inevitably; for she had loved life, not as 
Emily loved it, like an equal, with power over it 
and pride and an unearthly understanding, virgin 
and unafraid. There was something slightly sub- 
servient, consciously inferior, in Charlotte's atti- 
tude to life. She had loved it secretly, with a sort 
of shame, with a corroding passion and incredulity 
and despair. Such natures are not seldom victims 
of the power they would propitiate. It killed her in 
her effort to bring forth life. 

When the end came she could not realise it. For 
the first time she was incredulous of disaster. She 
heard, out of her last stupor, her husband praying 
that God would spare her, and she whispered, 'Oh, 
I am not going to die, am I.^* He will not separate 
us; we have been so happy.' 

You can see her youth rising up beside that death- 
bed and answering, 'That is why.' 

And yet, could even Charlotte's youth have 
been so sure as to the cheating and betrayal.'* That 
happiness of hers was cut short in the moment of 
its perfection. She was not to suffer any disen- 
chantment or decline; her love was not to know any 




Sx/^rAr t .^./fL/^/.^ 



THE THREE BRONTES 41 

cold of fear or her genius any fever of frustration. 
She was saved the struggle we can see before her. 
Arthur Nicholls was passionately fond of Char- 
lotte. But he was hostile to Charlotte's genius and 
to Charlotte's fame. A plain, practical, robust 
man, inimical to any dream. He could be adorably 
kind to a sick, submissive Charlotte. Would he 
have been so tender to a Charlotte in revolt .^^ She 
was spared the torture of the choice between Arthur 
Nicholls and her genius. We know how she would 
have chosen. It is well for her, and it is all one to 
literature, that she died, not 'in a time of promise,' 
but in the moment of fulfilment. 

No. Of these tragic Brontes the most tragic, the 
most pitiful, the most mercilessly abused by des- 
tiny, was Anne. An interminable, monstrous exile 
is the impression we get of Anne's life in the years 
of her girlhood. There is no actual record of them. 
Nobody kept Anne's letters. We never hear her 
sad voice raised in self-pity or revolt. It is doubtful 
if she ever raised it. She waited in silence and 
resignation, and then told her own story in Agnes 
Grey. But her figure remains dim in her own story 
and in the classic 'Lives.' We only know that she 
was the youngest, and that, unlike her sisters, she 
was pretty. She had thick brown curling hair and 
violet blue eyes and delicate dark eyebrows, and 
a skin, rose and white for her sisters' sallow, that 



42 THE THREE BRONTES 

must have given some ominous hint of fever. This 
delicate thing was broken on the wheel of life. They 
say of Anne perpetually that she was 'gentle.' In 
Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head 
high, her eyes gaze straight forward, and you w^on- 
der whether, before the breaking point, she was 
always as gentle as they say. But you never see 
her in any moment of revolt. Her simple poems, 
at their bitterest, express no more than a frail 
agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of 
the head in conscious rectitude is all that breaks 
the long plaint of Agnes Grey. 

There is no piety in that plaint. It is purely 
pagan; the cry of youth cheated of its desire. Life 
brought her no good gifts beyond the slender 
ineffectual beauty that left her undesired. Her 
tremulous, expectant womanhood was cheated. 
She never saw so much as the flying veil of joy, 
or even of such pale, uninspired happiness as she 
dreamed in Agnes Grey. She was cheated of her 
innocent dream. 

And by an awful irony her religion failed her. 
She knew its bitterness, its terrors, its exactions. 
She never knew its ecstasies, its flaming mysteries, 
nor, even at her very last, its consolations. Her 
tender conscience drew an unspeakable torment 
from the spectacle of her brother's degradation. 

For it was on Anne, who had no genius to sustain 
her, that poor Branwell, with the burden of his 



THE THREE BRONTES 43 

destiny, weighed most hard. It was Anne at Thorp 
Green who had the first terrible misgivings, the 
intolerable premonitions. 

'■ That wretched story is always cropping up again. 
The lady whom Mrs. Gaskell, with a murderous 
selection of adjectives, called *that mature and 
wicked woman,' has been cleared as far as evidence 
and common-sense could clear her. But the slander 
is perpetually revived. It has always proved too 
much for the Bronte biographers. Madame Du- 
claux published it again twenty years after, in 
spite of the evidence and in spite of Mrs. Gaskell's 
retractation. You would have thought that Bran- 
well might have been allowed to rest in the grave 
he dug for himself so well. But no, they will not let 
him rest. Bran well drank, and he ate opium; and, 
as if drink and opium and erotic madness were not 
enough, they must credit him with an open breach 
of the seventh commandment as well. M. Dimnet, 
the most able of recent critics of the Brontes, thinks 
and maintains against all evidence that there was 
more in it than Branwell's madness. He will not 
give up the sordid tragedy a trois. He thinks he 
knows what Anne thought of Branwell's behaviour, 
and what awful secret she was hinting at, and what 
she told her sisters when she came back to Haworth. 
He argues that Anne Bronte saw and heard things, 
and that her testimony is not to be set aside. 
What did Anne Bronte see and hear? She saw 



44 THE THREE BRONTES 

her brother consumed by an illegitimate passion; 
a passion utterly hopeless, given the nature of the 
lady. The lady had been kind to Anne, to Bran- 
well she had been angelically kind. Anne saw that 
his behaviour was an atrocious return for her kind- 
ness. Further than that the lady hardly counted 
in Anne's vision. Her interest was centred on her 
brother. She saw him taking first to drink and then 
to opium. She saw that he was going mad, and he 
did go mad. One of the most familiar symptoms of 
morphia mania is a tendency to erotic hallucina- 
tions of the precise kind that Branwell suffered 
from. Anne was unable to distinguish between such 
a hallucination and depravity. But there is not 
a shadow of evidence that she thought what M. 
Dimnet thinks, or that if she had thought it she 
made Charlotte and Emily think it too. Branwell's 
state was quite enough in itself to break their 
hearts. His letters to Leyland, to John Brown, the 
sexton, to Francis Grundy, record with frightful 
vividness every phase of his obsession. 

It is inconceivable that such letters should have 
been kept, still more inconceivable that they 
should have been published. It is inconceivable 
that Mrs. Gaskell should have dragged the pitiful 
and shameful figure into the light. Nobody can 
save poor Branwell now from the dreadful immor- 
tality thrust on him by his enemies and friends with 
equal zeal. All that is left to us is a merciful under- 



THE THREE BRONTES 45 

standing of his case. Branwell's case, once for all, 
was purely pathological. There was nothing great 
about him, not even his passion for Mrs. Robinson. 
Properly speaking, it was not a passion at all, it 
was a disease. Branwell was a degenerate, as incap- 
able of passion as he was of poetry. His sisters, 
Anne and Charlotte, talked with an amazing inno- 
cence about Branwell's vices. Simple and beautiful 
souls, they never for a moment suspected that his 
worst vice was sentimentaHsm. In the beginning, 
before it wrecked him, nobody enjoyed his own 
emotions more than Branwell. At his worst he 
wallowed voluptuously in the torments of frustra- 
tion. At the end, what with drink and what with 
opium, he was undoubtedly insane. His letters are 
priceless pathological documents. They reveal all 
the workings of his peculiar mania. He thinks 
everybody is plotting to keep him from Mrs. Rob- 
inson, Faced at every turn with the evidence of 
this lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a 
lunatic twist to prove the contrary. He takes the 
strangest people into his confidence, John Brown, 
the sexton, and the Robinson's coachman. Queer 
flames of lucidity dart here and there through this 
madness : ' The probability of her becoming free to 
give me herself and estate ever rose to drive away 
the prospect of her decline under her present grief.' 
*I had reason to hope that ere very long I should 
be the husband of a lady whom I loved best in the 



46 THE THREE BRONTES 

world, and with whom, in more than competence, 
I might live at leisure to try to make myself a name 
in the world of posterity, without being pestered 
by the small but countless botherments, which, like 
mosquitoes, sting us in the world of work-day toil. 
That hope and herself are gone — she to wither 
into patiently pining decline — it to make room for 
drudgery.' It is all sordid as well as terrible. We 
have no right to know these things. Mrs. Oliphant 
is almost justified in her protest against Charlotte 
as the first to betray her brother. 

But did Charlotte betray Branwell.^^ Not in her 
letters. She never imagined — how could she? — 
that those letters would be published. Not in her 
novels. Her novels give no portrait of Bran well 
and no hint that could be easily understood. It is 
in her prefaces to her sisters' novels that he appears, 
darkly. Charlotte, outraged by the infamous ar- 
ticle in the Quarterly, was determined that what 
had been said of her should never be said of Anne 
and Emily. She felt that their works offered irre- 
sistible provocation to the scandalous reviewer. 
She thought it necessary to explain how they came 
by their knowledge of evil. 

This vindication of her sisters is certainly an 
indictment of her brother to anybody who knew 
enough to read between the lines. Charlotte may 
have innocently supposed that nobody knew or 
ever would know enough. Unfortunately, Mrs. 



THE THREE BRONTES 47 

Gaskell knew; and when it came to vindicating 
Charlotte, she considered herself justified in expos- 
ing Charlotte's brother because Charlotte herself 
had shown her the way. 

But Charlotte might have spared her pains. 
Branwell does not account for Heathcliff any more 
than he accounts for Rochester. He does not even 
account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He 
accounts only for himself. He is important chiefly 
in relation to the youngest of the Brontes. Oddly 
enough, this boy, who was once thought greater 
than his sister Emily, was curiously akin to the 
weak and ineffectual Anne. He shows the weird 
flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and 
intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way 
with destiny, her knack of missing things. She had 
a touch of his morbidity. She was given to silences 
which in anybody but Anne would have been called 
morose. It was her fate to be associated with him 
in the hour and in the scene of his disgrace. And 
he was offered up unwittingly by Charlotte as a 
sacrifice to Anne's virtue. 

Like Branwell, Anne had no genius. She shows 
for ever gentle, and, in spite of an unconquerable 
courage, conquered. And yet there was more in her 
than gentleness. There was, in this smallest and 
least considerable of the Brontes, an immense, a 
terrifying audacity. Charlotte was bold, and Emily 



48 THE THREE BRONTES 

was bolder; but this audacity of Anne's was greater 
than Charlotte's boldness or than Emily's, because 
it was willed, it was deliberate, open-eyed; it had 
none of the superb unconsciousness of genius. 
Anne took her courage in both hands when she sat 
down to write The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, There 
are scenes, there are situations, in Anne's amazing 
novel, which for sheer audacity stand alone in mid- 
Victorian literature, and which would hold their 
own in the literature of revolt that followed. It 
cannot be said that these scenes and situations are 
tackled with a master-hand. But there is a certain 
grasp in Anne's treatment, and an astonishing 
lucidity. Her knowledge of the seamy side of life 
was not exhaustive. But her diagnosis of certain 
states, her realisation of certain motives, suggests 
Balzac rather than any of the Brontes. Thackeray, 
with the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes, would 
have shrunk from recording Mrs. Huntingdon's 
ultimatum to her husband. The slamming of that 
bedroom door fairly resounds through the long 
emptiness of Anne's novel. But that door is the 
crux of the situation, and if Anne was not a genius 
she was too much of an artist to sacrifice her crux. 
And not only was Anne revolutionary in her 
handling of moral situations, she was an insurgent 
in religious thought. Not to believe in the dogma 
of eternal punishment was, in mid-Victorian times 
and evangelical circles, to be almost an atheist. 



THE THREE BRONTES 49 

When, somewhere in the late seventies, Dean 
Farrar published his Eternal Hope, that book fell 
like a bomb into the ranks of the orthodox. But 
long before Dean Farrar's book Anne Bronte had 
thrown her bomb. There are two pages in The 
Tenant of Wildfell Hall that anticipate and sum up 
his now innocent arguments. Anne fairly let her- 
self go here. And though in her 'Word to the 
Elect' (who *may rejoice to think themselves 
secure ') she declares that — 

'None shall sink to everlasting woe 
Who have not well deserved the wrath of Heaven,' 

she presently relents, and tacks on a poem in a 
lighter measure, expressing her hope — 

'That soon the wicked shall at last 

Be fitted for the skies; 
And when their dreadful doom is past. 

To hght and Ufe arise.' 

It is said (Charlotte said it) that Anne suffered 
from religious melancholy of a peculiarly dark and 
Calvinistic type. I very much suspect that Anne's 
melancholy, like Branwell's passion, was pathologi- 
cal, and that what her soul suffered from was reli- 
gious doubt. She could not reach that height where 
Emily moved serenely; she could not see that — 

'Vain are the thousand creeds 
That move men's hearts : unutterably vain.' 

There was a time when her tremulous, clinging 
faith was broken by contact with Emily's contempt 
for creeds. When Anne was at Ha worth she and 



50 THE THREE BRONTES 

Emily were inseparable. They tramped the moors 
together. With their arms round each other's 
shoulders, they paced up and down the parlour of 
the Parsonage. They showed the mysterious at- 
traction and affinity of opposites. Anne must have 
been fascinated, and at the same time appalled, 
by the radiant, revealing, annihilating sweep of 
Emily's thought. She was not indifferent to creeds. 
But you can see her fearful and reluctant youth 
yielding at last to Emily's thought, until she caught 
a glimpse of the 'repose' beyond the clash of 'con- 
quered good and conquering ill.' You can see how 
the doctrine of eternal punishment went by the 
board; how Anne, who had gone through agonies 
of orthodox fear on account of Bran well, must have 
adjusted things somehow, and arrived at peace. 
Trust in 'the merits of the Redeemer' is, after all, 
trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer and re- 
deemed. 

Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material 
voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang na'ifly 
of the 'Captive Dove' that makes unheard its 
'joyless moan,' of 'the heart that Nature formed to 
love,' pining, 'neglected and alone.' She sang of 
the 'Narrow Way,' 'Be it,' she sings, 'thy constant 
aim' — 

'To labour and to love, 

To pardon and endure, 
To lift thy heart to God above. 

And keep thy conscience pure.' 



THE THREE BRONTES 51 

She hears the wind in an alien wood and cries for 
the Parsonage garden, and for the 'barren hills' — 

' Where scarce the scattered, stunted trees 

Can yield an answering swell. 
But where a wilderness of heath 
Returns the sound as well. 

* For yonder garden, fair and wide. 

With groves of evergreen, 
Long winding walks, and borders trim 
• And velvet lawns between; 

* Restore to me that httle spot. 

With grey hills compassed round. 
Where knotted grass neglected lies. 
And weeds usurp the ground.' 

For she too loved the moors; and through her 
love for them she wrote two perfect lines when she 
called on Memory to — 

'For ever hang thy dreamy spell 
Round mountain star and heather-bell.' 

The critics, the theorists, the tale-mongers, have 
left Anne quiet in that grave on the sea-coast, 
where she lies apart. Her gentle insignificance 
served her well. 

But no woman who ever wrote was more criti- 
cised, more spied upon, more lied about, than 
Charlotte. It was as if the singular purity and pov- 
erty of her legend offered irresistible provocation. 
The blank page called for the scribbler. The silence 
that hung about her was dark with challenge; it 



52 THE THREE BRONTES 

was felt to be ambiguous, enigmatic. Reserve sug- 
gests a reservation, something hidden and kept 
back from the insatiable public with its 'right to 
know.' Mrs. Gaskell with all her indiscretions had 
not given it enough. The great, classic Life of 
Charlotte Bronte was, after all, incomplete. Until 
something more was known about her, Charlotte 
herself was incomplete. It was nothing that Mrs. 
Gaskell's work was the finest, tenderest portrait 
of a woman that it was ever given to a woman to 
achieve; nothing that she was not only recklessly 
and superbly loyal to Charlotte, but that in her 
very indiscretions she was, as far as Charlotte was 
concerned, incorruptibly and profoundly true. 

Since Mrs. Gaskell's time, other hands have been 
at work on Charlotte, improving Mrs. Gaskell's 
masterpiece. A hundred little touches have been 
added to it. First, it was supposed to be too tragic, 
too deliberately and impossibly sombre (that sad 
book of which Charlotte's friend, Mary Taylor, 
said that it was *not so gloomy as the truth'). So 
first came Sir Wemyss Reid, conscientiously working 
up the high lights till he got the values all wrong. 
'If the truth must be told,' he says, 'the life of the 
author of Jane Eyre was by no means so joyless as 
the world now believes it to have been.' And he 
sets out to give us the truth. But all that he does 
to lighten the gloom is to tell a pleasant story of 
how 'one bright June morning in 1833, a handsome 



THE THREE BRONTES 53 

carriage and pair is standing opposite the Devon- 
shire Arms at Bolton Bridge.' In the handsome 
carriage is a young girl, Ellen Nussey, waiting for 
Charlotte Bronte and her brother and sisters to go 
with her for a picnic to Bolton Abbey. 

'Presently,' says Sir Wemyss Reid, *on the steep 
road which stretches across the moors to Keighley, 
the sound of wheels is heard, mingled with the 
merry speech and merrier laughter of fresh young 
voices. Shall we go forward unseen,' he asks, *and 
study the approaching travellers whilst they are 
still upon the road.^^ Their conveyance is no hand- 
some carriage, but a ricketty dog-cart, unmistak- 
ably betraying its neighbourship to the carts and 
ploughs of some rural farmyard. The horse, freshly 
taken from the fields, is driven by a youth who, in 
spite of his countrified dress, is no mere bumpkin. 
His shock of red hair hangs down in somewhat 
ragged locks behind his ears, for Branwell Bronte 
esteems himself a genius and a poet, and, following 
the fashion of the times, has that abhorrence of the 
barber's shears which genius is supposed to affect. 
But the lad's face is a handsome and striking one, 
full of Celtic fire and humour, untouched by the 
slightest shade of care, hopeful, promising, even 
brilliant. How gaily he jokes with his three sisters; 
with what inexhaustible volubility he pours out 
quotations from his favourite poets, applying them 
to the lovely scenes around him; and with what a 



54 THE THREE BRONTES 

mischievous delight in his superior nerve and met- 
tle, he attempts the feats of charioteering, which 
fill the heart of the youngest of the party with 
sudden terrors! Beside him, in a dress of marvel- 
lous plainness and ugliness, stamped with the 
brand *' home-made" in characters which none can 
mistake, is the eldest of the sisters. Charlotte is 
talking too; there are bright smiles upon her face; 
she is enjoying everything around her, the splendid 
morning, the charms of leafy trees and budding 
roses, and the ever musical stream; most of all, 
perhaps, the charm of her brother's society, and 
the expectation of that coming meeting with her 
friends, which is so near at hand. Behind sits a 
pretty little girl, with fine complexion and delicate 
regular features, whom the stranger would pick 
out as the beauty of the company, and a tall, rather 
angular figure, clad in a dress exactly resembling 
Charlotte's. Emily Bronte does not talk so much 
as the rest of the party, but her wonderful eyes, 
brilliant and unfathomable as the pool at the foot 
of a waterfall, but radiant also with a wealth of 
tenderness and warmth, show how her soul is 
expanding under the influences of the scene; how 
quick she is to note the least prominent of the 
beauties around her, how intense is her enjoyment 
of the songs of the birds, the brilliancy of the sun- 
shine, the rich scent of the flower-bespangled hedge- 
rows. If she does not, like Charlotte and Anne, 



THE THREE BRONTES 55 

meet her brother's ceaseless flood of spiarkling 
words with opposing (currents of speech, she utters 
a strange, deep guttural sound which those who 
know her best interpret as the language of a joy 
too deep for articulate expression. Gaze at them 
as they pass you in the quiet road, and acknowledge 
that, in spite of their rough and even uncouth 
exteriors, a happier four could hardly be met with 
in this favourite haunt of pleasure-seekers during 
a long summer's day.' 

And you do gaze at them and are sadder, if any- 
thing, than you were before. You see them, if 
anything, more poignantly. You see their cheerful 
biographer doing all he knows, and the light he 
shoots across the blackness only makes it blacker. 

*Nessun maggior dolore 
Che ricordarsi di tempo felice 
Nella miseria'; 

and in the end the biographer with all his cheerful- 
ness succumbs to the tradition of misery, and even 
adds a dark contribution of his own, the suggestion 
of an unhappy love affair of Charlotte's. 

After Sir Wemyss Reid came Mr. Francis Grundy 
with his little pictures, Pictures of the Past, present- 
ing a dreadfully unattractive Charlotte. 

Then came Mr. Leyland, following Mr. Grundy, 
with his glorification of Branwell and his hint that 
Charlotte made it very hard at home for the poor 
boy. He repeats the story that Branwell told Mr. 



56 THE THREE BRONTES 

George Searle Phillips, how he went to see a dying 
girl in the village, and sat with her half an hour, 
and read a psalm to her and a hymn, and how he 
felt like praying with her too, but he was not 
*good enough,' how he came away with a heavy 
heart and fell into melancholy musings. 'Char- 
lotte observed my depression,' Bran well said, *and 
asked what ailed me. So I told her. She looked at 
me with a look which I shall never forget — if I 
live to be a hundred years old — which I never 
shall. It was not like her at all. It wounded me as 
if someone had struck me a blow in the mouth. It 
involved ever so many things in it. It ran over me, 
questioning and examining, as if I had been a wild 
beast. It said, "Did my ears deceive me, or did I 
hear aright.'*" And then came the painful, baflBed 
expression, which was worse than all. It said, "I 
wonder if that's true?" But, as she left the room, 
she seemed to accuse herself of having wronged me, 
and smiled kindly upon me, and said, "She is my 
little scholar, and I will go and see her." I replied 
not a word. I was too much cut up ! When she was 
gone, I came over here to the Black Bull, and made 
a note of it. . . .' 

You see the implication.^ It was Charlotte who 
drove him to the Black Bull. That was Branwell's 
impression of Charlotte. Just the sort of impression 
that an opium-eater would have of a beloved sister. 

But Branwell's impression was good enough for 



THE THREE BRONTES 57 

Madame Duclaux to found her theory on. Her 
theory is that Charlotte was inferior to Emily in 
tenderness. It may well be so, and yet Charlotte 
would remain above most women tender, for 
Emily's wealth would furnish forth a score of sis- 
ters. The simple truth is that Charlotte had 
nerves, and Branwell was extremely trying. And 
it is possible that Emily had less to bear, that in 
her detachment she was protected more than Char- 
lotte from Branwell at his worst. 

Meanwhile tales were abroad presenting Char- 
lotte in the queerest lights. There is that immortal 
story of how Thackeray gave a party for Currer 
Bell at his house in Young Street, and how Currer 
Bell had a headache and lay on a sofa in the back 
drawing-room, and refused to talk to anybody but 
the governess; and how Thackeray at last, very 
late, with a finger on his lip, stole out of the house 
and took refuge in his club. No wonder if this 
quaint and curious Charlotte survived in the mem- 
ory of Thackeray's daughter. But, even apart from 
the headache, you can see how it came about, 
how the sight of the governess evoked Charlotte 
Bronte's unforgotten agony. She saw in the amazed 
and cheerful lady her own sad youth, slighted and 
oppressed, solitary in a scene of gaiety — she could 
not have seen her otherwise — and her warm heart 
rushed out to her. She was determined that that 
governess should have a happy evening if nobody 



58 THE THREE BRONTES 

else had. Her behaviour was odd, if you like, it was 
even absurd, but it had the sublimity of vicarious 
expiation. Has anyone ever considered its signifi- 
cance, the magnitude of her deed.'* For Charlotte, 
to be the guest of honour on that brilliant night, in 
the house of Thackeray, her divinity, was to touch 
the topmost height of fame. And she turned her 
back on the brilliance and the fame and the face of 
her divinity, and offered herself up in flames as a 
sacrifice for all the governesses that were and had 
ever been and would be. 

And after the fine stories came the little leg- 
ends — things about Charlotte when she was a 
governess herself at Mrs. Sidgwick's, and the tittle- 
tattle of the parish. One of the three curates whom 
Charlotte made so shockingly immortal avenged 
himself for his immortality by stating that the 
trouble with Charlotte was that she would fight for 
mastery in the parish. Who can believe him? If 
there is one thing that seems more certain than 
another it is Charlotte's utter indifference to 
parochial matters. But Charlotte was just, and 
she may have objected to the young man's way 
with the Dissenters; we know that she did very 
strongly object to Mr. William Weightman's way. 
And that, I imagine, was the trouble between 
Charlotte and the curates. 

As for the Sidgwicks, Charlotte's biographers 
have been rather hard on them. Mr. Leslie 



THE THREE BRONTES 



59 



Stephen calls them * coarse employers.' They were 
certainly not subtle enough to divine the hidden 
genius in their sad little governess. It was, I im- 
agine, Charlotte's alien, enigmatic face that pro- 
voked a little Sidgwick to throw a Bible at her. She 
said Mrs. Sidgwick did not know her, and did not 
* intend to know her.' She might have added that 
if she had intended Mrs. Sidgwick could not pos- 
sibly have known her. And when the Sidgwicks 
said (as they did say to their cousin, Mr. Arthur 
Christopher Benson) that if Miss Bronte *was in- 
vited to walk to church with them, she thought 
she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was 
not invited she imagined she was being excluded 
from the family circle,' that was simply their 
robust view of the paralysed attitude of a shy girl 
among strangers, in an agony of fear lest she should 
cut in where she was not wanted. 

And allowances must be made for Mrs. Sidg- 
wick. She was, no doubt, considerably annoyed at 
finding that she had engaged a thoroughly incom- 
petent and apparently thoroughly morbid young 
person who had offered herself as a nursery- 
governess and did n't know how to keep order in 
the nursery. Naturally there was trouble at Stone- 
gappe. Then one fine day Mrs. Sidgwick discov- 
ered that there was, after all, a use for that incom- 
prehensible and incompetent Miss Bronte. Miss 
Bronte had a gift. She could sew. She could sew 



60 THE THREE BRONTES 

beautifully. Her stitching, if you would believe it, 
was a dream. And Mrs. Sidgwick saw that Miss 
Bronte's one talent was not lodged in her useless. 
So Charlotte sat alone all evening in the school- 
room at Stonegappe, a small figure hidden in pure 
white, billowy seas of muslin, and lamented thus: 
*She cares nothing in the world about me except 
to contrive how the greatest possible quantity of 
labour may be squeezed out of me, and to that end 
she overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, 
yards of cambric to hem, muslin night-caps to 
make, and above all things, dolls to dress.' And 
Mrs. Sidgwick complained that Charlotte did not 
love the children, and forgot how little she liked it 
when the children loved Charlotte, and was un- 
aware, poor lady, that it was recorded of her, and 
would be recorded to all time, that she had said 
*Love the governess, my dear!' when her little im- 
pulsive boy put his hand in Charlotte's at the din- 
ner-table, and cried *I love 'ou. Miss Bronte.* It 
was the same little impulsive boy who threw the 
Bible at Charlotte, and also threw a stone which 
hit her. 

No wonder that Miss Bronte's one and only 
'pleasant afternoon' was when Mr. Sidgwick went 
out walking in his fields with his children and his 
Newfoundland dog, and Charlotte (by order) fol- 
lowed and observed him from behind. 
i Of course all these old tales should have gone 



THE THREE BRONTES 61 

where Mrs. Sidgwick's old muslin caps went; but 
they have not, and so it has got about that Char- 
lotte Bronte was not fond of children. Even Mr. 
Swinburne, at the height of his magnificent eulogy, 
after putting crown upon crown upon her head, 
pauses and wonders: had she any love for children.'^ 
He finds in her *a plentiful lack of inborn baby- 
worship'; she is unworthy to compare in this with 
George Eliot, *the spiritual mother of Totty, of 
Eppie, and of Lillo.' *The fiery-hearted Vestal of 
Haworth,' he says, *had no room reserved in the 
palace of her passionate and high-minded imagina- 
tion as a nursery for inmates of such divine and 
delicious quality.' There was little Georgette in 
Villette^ to say nothing of Polly, and there was 
Adele in Jane Eyre. But Mr. Swinburne had for- 
gotten about little Georgette. Like George Henry 
Lewes he is * well-nigh moved to think one of the 
most powerfully and exquisitely written chapters 
in Shirley a chapter which could hardly have been 
written at all by a woman, or, for that matter, by 
a man, of however noble and kindly a nature, in 
whom the instinct, or nerve, or organ of love for 
children was even of average natural strength and 
sensibility'; so diflScult was it for him to believe in 
*the dread and repulsion felt by a forsaken wife 
and tortured mother for the very beauty and dainty 
sweetness of her only new-born child, as recalling 
the cruel, sleek charm of the human tiger that had 



62 THE THREE BRONTES 

begotten it.' And so he crowns her with all crowns 
but that of *love for children.' He is still tender 
to her, seeing in her that one monstrous lack; he 
touches it with sorrow and a certain shame. 

Mr. Birrell follows him. 'Miss Bronte,' he says 
with confidence, *did not care for children. She 
had no eye for them. Hence it comes about that 
her novel-children are not good.' He is moved to 
playful sarcasm when he tells how in August of 
eighteen-fifty-three *Miss Bronte suffered a keen 
disappointment.' She went to Scotland with some 
friends who took their baby with them. The par- 
ents thought the baby was ill when it wasn't, and 
insisted on turning back, and Charlotte had to give 
up her holiday. 'All on account of a baby,' says 
Mr. Birrell, and refers you to Charlotte's letter 
on the subject, implying that it was cold-blooded. 
The biographer can quote letters for his purpose, 
and Mr. Birrell omits to tell us that Charlotte 
wrote 'had any evil consequences followed a pro- 
longed stay, I should never have forgiven myself.' 
You are to imagine that Charlotte could have for- 
given herself perfectly well, for Charlotte 'did not 
care for children.' 

Mrs. Oliphant does not echo that cry. She was 
a woman and knew better. 

For I believe that here we touch the very heart 
of the mystery that was Charlotte Bronte. We 
would have no right to touch it, to approach it, 



THE THREE BRONTES 63 

were it not that other people have already violated 
all that was most sacred and most secret in that 
mystery, and have given the world a defaced and 
disfigured Charlotte Bronte. I believe that this 
love of children which even Mr. Swinburne has 
denied to her, was the key to Charlotte's nature. 
We are face to face here, not with a want in her, 
but with an abyss, depth beyond depth of tender- 
ness and longing and frustration, of a passion that 
found no clear voice in her works, because it was 
one with the elemental nature in her, undefined, un- 
uttered, unutterable. 

She was afraid of children; she was awkward 
with them; because such passion has shynesses, 
distances, and terrors unknown to the average 
comfortable women who become happy mothers. 
It has even its perversions, when love hardly 
knows itself from hate. Such love demands before 
all things possession. It cries out for children of its 
own blood and flesh. I believe that there were 
moments when it was pain for Charlotte to see the 
children born and possessed by other women. It 
must have been agony to have to look after them, 
especially when the rule was that they were not to 
*love the governess.' 

The proofs of this are slender, but they are suffi- 
cient. There is little Georgette, the sick child that 
Lucy nurses in the Pensionnat: * little Georgette 
still piped her plaintive wail, appealing to me 



64 THE THREE BRONTES 

by her familiar term, "Minnie, Minnie, me very 
poorly!" till my heart ached' . . . *I affected 
Georgette; she was a sensitive and loving child; to 
hold her in my lap, or carry her in my arms, was to 
me a treat. To-night she would have me lay my head 
on the pillow of her crib; she even put her little 
arms round my neck. Her clasp and the nestling 
action with which she pressed her cheek to mine 
made me almost cry with a sort of tender pain.* 

Once during a spring-cleaning at Upperwood 
House Charlotte was Mrs. White's nursemaid as 
well as her governess, and she wrote: 'By dint of 
nursing the fat baby it has got to know me and be 
fond of me. I suspect myself of growing rather 
fond of it.' Years later she wrote to Mrs. Gaskell, 
after staying with her : * Could you manage to con- 
vey a small kiss to that dear but dangerous little 
person, Julia? She surreptitiously possessed her- 
self of a minute fraction of my heart, which has 
been missing ever since I saw her.' Mrs. Gaskell 
tells us that there was 'a strong, mutual attrac- 
tion' between Julia, her youngest little girl, and 
Charlotte Bronte. 'The child,' she says, 'would 
steal her little hand into Miss Bronte's scarcely 
larger one, and each took pleasure in this appar- 
ently unobserved caress.' May I suggest that child- 
ren do not steal their little hands into the hands 
of people who do not care for them? Their instinct 
is infallible. 



THE THREE BRONTES 65 

Charlotte Bronte tried to give an account of her 
feehng for children; it was something like the 
sacred awe of the lover. * Whenever I see Florence 
and Julia again I shall feel like a fond but bashful 
suitor, who views at a distance the fair personage 
to whom, in his clownish awe, he dare not risk a 
near approach. Such is the clearest idea I can give 
you of my feeling towards children I like, but to 
whom I am a stranger — and to what children am 
I not a stranger?' 

Extraordinary that Charlotte's critics have 
missed the pathos of that cri de coeur. It is so clearly 
an echo from the 'house of bondage,' where Char- 
lotte was made a stranger to the beloved, where 
the beloved threw stones and Bibles at her. You 
really have to allow for the shock of an experience 
so blighting. It is all part of the perversity of the 
fate that dogged her, that her feeling should have 
met with that reverse. But it was there, guarded 
with a certain shy austerity. She 'suspected' her- 
self of getting rather fond of the baby. 

She hid her secret even from herself, as women 
will hide these things. But her dreams betrayed her 
after the way of dreams. Charlotte's dream (pre- 
monitory, she thought, of trouble) was that she 
carried a little crying child, and could not still its 
cry. 'She described herself,' Mrs. Gaskell says, 
'as having the most painful sense of pity for the 
little thing, lying inertj as sick children do, while 



66 THE THREE BRONTES 

she walked about in some gloomy place with it, 
such as the aisle of Haworth Church.' This dream 
she gives to Jane Eyre, unconscious of its pro- 
found significance and fitness. It is a pity that Mr. 
Swinburne did not pay attention to Charlotte's 
dream. 

All her life, I think, she suffered because of the 
perpetual insurgence of this secret, impassioned, 
maternal energy. Hence the sting of Lewes's fam- 
ous criticism, beginning: *The grand function of 
woman, it must always be remembered ' (as if Char- 
lotte had forgotten it!) *is Maternity'; and, work- 
ing up from his criticism of that chapter in Shirley 
to a climax of adjuration: *Currer Bell! if under 
your heart had ever stirred a child ; if to your bosom 
a babe had ever been pressed — that mysterious 
part of j^our being, towards which all the rest of it 
was drawn, in which your whole soul was trans- 
ported and absorbed — never could you have imag- 
ined such a falsehood as that!' It was impossible 
for Charlotte to protest against anything but the 
abominable bad taste of Lewes's article, other- 
wise she might have told him that she probably 
knew rather more about those mysteries than he 
did. It was she who gave us that supreme image 
of disastrous love. *I looked at my love; it shiv- 
ered in my heart like a suffering child in a cold 
cradle!' And this woman died before her child 
was born. * 



THE THREE BRONTES 67 

Then there is Mrs. Oliphant again. Though she 
was not one of those who said Charlotte Bronte 
was not fond of children, though she would have 
died rather than have joined Lewes in his unspeak- 
able cry against her, Mrs. Oliphant made certain 
statements in no better taste than his. She sug- 
gests that Charlotte, fond or not fond of children, 
was too fond of matrimonial dreams. Her picture 
(the ftiarried woman's picture) is of an undesired 
and undesirable little spinster pining visibly and 
shamelessly in a parsonage. She would have us 
believe that from morning till night, from night 
till morning, Charlotte Bronte in the Parsonage 
thought of nothing but of getting married, that 
her dreams pursued, ruthlessly, the casual visitor. 
The hopelessness of the dream, the undesirability 
of Charlotte, is what makes her so irresistible to her 
sister novelist. 

There was *one subject,' she says, * which Char- 
lotte Bronte had at her command, having exper- 
ienced in her own person, and seen her nearest 
friends under the experience, of that solitude and 
longing of women of which she has made so re- 
markable an exposition. The long silence of life 
without an adventure or a change, the forlorn gaze 
out of windows which never show anyone coming 
who can rouse the slightest interest in the mind, 
the endless years and days which pass and pass, 
carrying away the bloom, extinguishing the lights 



68 THE THREE BRONTES 

of youth, bringing a dreary middle age before which 
the very soul shrinks, while yet the sufferer feels 
how strong is the current of life in her own veins, 
and how capable she is of all the active duties of 
existence — this was the essence and soul of the 
existence she knew best. Was there no help for it? 
Must the women wait and see their lives thrown 
away, and have no power to save themselves ! ' 

*The position,' she goes on, *in itself so tragic, is 
one which can scarcely be expressed without calling 
forth inevitable ridicule, a laugh at the best, more 
often a sneer, at the women whose desire for a 
husband is thus betrayed. Shirley and Caroline 
Helstone both cried out for that husband with an 
indignation, a fire and impatience, a sense of wrong 
and injury, which stopped the laugh for the mo- 
ment. It might be ludicrous, but it was horribly 
genuine and true.' (This is more than can be said 
of Mrs. Oliphant's view of the adorable Shirley 
Keeldar who was Emily Bronte. It is ludicrous 
enough, and it may be genuine, but it is certainly 
not true.) But Mrs. Oliphant is careful not to go 
too far. *Note,' she says, * there was nothing sens- 
ual about these young women. It was life they 
wanted ; they knew nothing of the grosser thoughts 
which the world with its jeers attributes to them: 
of such thoughts they were unconscious in a primi- 
tive innocence which, perhaps, only women under- 
stand.' Yet she characterises their * outcry' as 



THE THREE BRONTES 69 

* indelicate.' * All very well to talk of women work- 
ing for their living, finding new channels for them- 
selves, establishing their independence. How much 
have we said of all that' (Mrs. Oliphant thinks that 
she is rendering Charlotte Bronte's thought), 
'endeavouring to persuade ourselves! Charlotte 
Bronte had the courage of her opinions. It was not 
education nor a trade that her women wanted. It 
was not a living, but their share in life . . . Miss 
Bronte herself said correct things ' (observe that in- 
sincerity is insinuated here) * about the protection 
which a trade is to a woman, keeping her from a 
mercenary marriage; but this was not in the least 
the way of her heroines.' (Why, you naturally 
wonder, should it have been?) 'They wanted to be 
happy, no doubt, but above all things they wanted 
their share in life, to have their position by the side 
of men, which alone confers a natural equality, to 
have their shoulder to the wheel, their hands on 
the reins of common life, to build up the world 
and link the generations each to each.' (And very 
proper of them, too.) ' In her philosophy marriage 
was the only state which procured this, and if she 
did not recommend a mercenary marriage she was 
at least very tolerant about its conditions, insisting 
less upon love than was to be expected' (!) 'and 
with a covert conviction in her mind, that if not 
one man, then another was better than any com- 
plete abandonment of the larger path. Lucy Snowe 



70 THE THREE BRONTES 

for a long time had her heart very much set on 
Dr. John and his placid breadth of Englishism; but 
when she finally found out that to be impossible 
her tears were soon dried by the prospect of Paul 
Emanuel, so unlike him, coming into his place.' 

The obvious answer to all this is that Charlotte 
Bronte was writing in the mid-Victorian age, about 
mid-Victorian women, the women whom she saw 
around her; writing, without any * philosophy' or 

* covert conviction,' in the days before emancipa- 
tion, when marriage was the only chance of inde- 
pendence that a woman had. It would have been 
marvellous, if she had not had her sister Emily 
before her, that in such an age she should have con- 
ceived and created Shirley Keeldar. As for poor 
little Lucy with her two men, she is not the first 
heroine who mistook the false dawn for the true. 
Besides, Miss Bronte's 'philosophy' was exactly 
the opposite to that attributed to her, as anybody 
may see who reads Shirley. In these matters she 
burned what her age adored, and adored what it 
burned, a thorough revolutionary. 

But this is not the worst. Mrs. Oliphant pro- 
fesses to feel pity for her victim. *Poor Charlotte 
Bronte! She has not been as other women, pro- 
tected by the grave from all betrayal of the epi- 
sodes in her own life.' (You would imagine they 
were awful, the episodes in Charlotte Bronte's life.) 

* Everybody has betrayed her, and all she thought 



THE THREE BRONTES 71 

about this one, and that, and every name that was 
ever associated with hers. There was a Mr. Taylor 
from London, about whom she wrote with great 
freedom to her friend. Miss Nussey, telling how the 
little man had come, how he had gone away with- 
out any advance in the affairs, how a chill came 
over her when he appeared and she found him 
much less attractive than when at a distance, yet 
how 'she liked it as little when he went away, and 
was somewhat excited about his first letter, and 
even went so far as to imagine with a laugh that 
there might possibly be a dozen little Joe Taylors 
before all was over.* 

This is atrocious. But the malice and bad taste 
of it are nothing to the gross carelessness and ignor- 
ance it reveals — ignorance of facts and identities 
and names. Charlotte's suitor was Mr. James 
Taylor and not Joe. Joe, the brother of her friend, 
Mary Taylor, was married already to a lady called 
Amelia, and it is of Joe and his Amelia that Char- 
lotte writes. 'She must take heart' (Amelia had 
been singularly unsuccessful), 'there may yet be a 
round dozen of little Joe Taylors to look after — 
run after — to sort and switch and train up in the 
way they should go.' 

Of Mr. James Taylor she writes more decorously. 
Miss Nussey, as usual, had been thinking unwar- 
rantable things, and had made a most unbecoming 
joke about Jupiter and Venus, which outraged 



72 THE THREE BRONTES 

Charlotte's * common-sense.* *The idea of the little 
man,' says Charlotte, * shocks me less. He still 
sends his little newspaper; and the other day there 
came a letter of a bulk, volume, pith, judgment and 
knowledge, fit to have been the product of a giant. 
You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you 
please, but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy 
about this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, 
which adds a foot to his stature, turns his sandy 
locks dark, and altogether dignifies him a good deal 
in my estimation.' This is all she says by way of 
appreciation. She says later, 'his manners and his 
personal appearance scarcely pleased me more than 
at the first interview. ... I feel that in his way he 
has a regard for me; a regard which I cannot bring 
myself entirely to reciprocate in kind, and yet its 
withdrawal leaves a painful blank.' Miss Nussey 
evidently insists that Charlotte's feelings are en- 
gaged this time, arguing possibly from the 'painful 
blank ' ; and Charlotte becomes explicit. She speaks 
of the disadvantages of the alleged match, and we 
gather that Miss Nussey has been urging her to 
take the little man. 'But there is another thing 
which forms a barrier more difficult to pass than 
any of these. Would Mr. Taylor and I ever suit.'* 
Could I ever feel for him enough love to accept 
him as a husband.'* Friendship — gratitude — es- 
teem I have, but each moment he came near me, 
and that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my 



THE THREE BRONTES 73 

veins ran ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more 
gently to him; it is only close by that I grow rigid 
— stiffening with a strange mixture of apprehen- 
sion and anger — which nothing softens but his 
retreat, and a perfect subduing of his manner.' 
And again, *My conscience, I can truly say, does 
not now accuse me of having treated Mr. Taylor 
with injustice or unkindness ... but with every 
disposition and with every wish, with every inten- 
tion even to look on him in the most favourable 
point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to 
me in my inward heart to think of him as one that 
might one day be acceptable as a husband.' Could 
anything be more explicit.'^ And there is a good deal 
more of it. After one very searching criticism of 
Mr. Taylor: 'One does not like to say these things, 
but one had better be honest.' And of her honesty 
Charlotte's letters on this subject leave no doubt. 
There is not the smallest ground for supposing that 
even for a moment had she thought of Mr. James 
Taylor as *one that one day might be acceptable,' 
much less is there for Mr. Clement Shorter's sug- 
gestion that if he had come back from Bombay she 
would have married him. 

But Joe or James, it is all one to Mrs. Oliphant, 
with her theory of Charlotte Bronte. 'For her and 
her class, which did not speak of it, everything 
depended upon whether the women married or did 
not marry. Their thoughts were thus artificially 



74 THE THREE BRONTES 

fixed to one point in the horizon.' The rest is repe- 
tition, ending in the astounding verdict : * the seed 
she thus sowed has come to many growths that 
would have appalled Charlotte Bronte. But while it 
would be very unjust to blame her for the vagaries 
that have followed, and to which nothing could be 
less desirable than any building of the house or 
growth of the race, any responsibility or service, 
we must still believe that it was she who drew the 
curtain first aside and opened the gates to imps of 
evil meaning, polluting and profaning the domestic 
hearth.* 

That is Mrs. Oliphant on Charlotte Bronte. 

And even Mr. Clement Shorter, who has dealt so 
admirably with outrageous legends, goes half the 
way with the detractor. He has a theory that 
Charlotte Bronte was a woman of morbid mood, 
*to whom the problem of sex appealed with all its 
complications,' and that she 'dwelt continually on 
the problem of the ideal mate.' 

Now Charlotte may have dreamed of getting 
married (there have been more criminal dreams); 
she may have brooded continually over the pro- 
blem of the ideal mate, only of all these dreams and 
broodings there is not one atom of evidence — not 
one. Not a hint, not a trace, either in her character 
as we know it, or in her very voluminous private 
correspondence. The facts of her life disprove it. 
Her letters to Ellen Nussey (never meant for pub- 



THE THREE BRONTES 75 

lication) reveal the workings of Charlotte's femin- 
ine mind when appHed to *the sex problem'; a 
mind singularly wholesome and impersonal, and 
singularly detached. Charlotte is full of lights upon 
this awful subject of matrimony, which, by the 
way, had considerably more interest for Miss Nus- 
sey than it had for her. In fact, if it had not been 
for Miss Nussey it would not have appeared so 
often as it did in Charlotte's letters. If you pay 
attention to the context (a thing that theorists 
never do) you see, what is indeed obvious, that a 
large portion of Charlotte Bronte's time was taken 
up in advising and controlling Ellen Nussey, that 
amiable and impulsive prototype of Caroline Hel- 
stone. She is called upon in all Miss Nussey's hours 
of crisis, and there seem to have been a great many 
of them. 'Do not,' she writes, 'be over-persuaded 
to marry a man you can never respect — I do not 
say love, because I think if you can respect a person 
before marriage, moderate love at least will come 
after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced 
that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, 
it seldom or never meets with a requital; and in the 
second place, if it did, the feeling would be only 
temporary; it would last the honeymoon, and then, 
perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse 
perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the 
case on the man's part; and on the woman's — God 
help her, if she is left to love passionately and alone.' 



76 THE THREE BRONTES 

*I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never 
marry at all.' 

And again, to Miss Nussey, six months later. 
*Did you not once say to me in all childlike sim- 
plicity, "I thought, Charlotte, no young lady 
should fall in love till the offer was actually made? " 
I forgot what answer I made at the time, but I now 
reply, after due consideration. Right as a glove, 
the maxim is just, and I hope you will always at- 
tend to it. I will even extend and confirm it: no 
young lady should fall in love till the offer has been 
made, accepted, the marriage ceremony performed, 
and the first half-year of wedded life has passed 
away. A woman may then begin to love, but with 
great precaution, very coolly, very moderately, 
very rationally. If she ever loves so much that a 
harsh word or a cold look cuts her to the heart, she 
is a fool. If she ever loves so much that her hus- 
band's will is her law, and that she has got into a 
habit of watching his looks in order that she may 
anticipate his wishes, she will soon be a neglected 
fool. Did I not tell you of an instance . . . ? * 

What could be more lucid, more light-hearted, 
and more sane? And if Charlotte is suspicious of 
the dangers of her own temperament, that only 
proves her lucidity and sanity the more. 

Later, at Brussels, when confronted with * three 
or four people's ' idea that * the future ejpoux of Miss 
Bronte is on the Continent/ she defends herself 



THE THREE BRONTES 77 

against the * silly imputation.' 'Not that it is a 
crime to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; 
but it is an imbecihty, which I reject with con- 
tempt, for women, who have neither fortune or 
beauty, to make marriage the principal object of 
their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their 
actions; not to be able to convince themselves that 
they are unattractive, and that they had better be 
quiet, and think of other things than wedlock.* 
Can anything be clearer? 

So much for herself. But she has to deal with 
Miss Nussey, in difficulties again, later: 'Papa has 
two or three times expressed a fear that since 

Mr. paid you so much attention, he will, 

perhaps, have made an impression on your mind 
which will interfere with your comfort. I tell him 
I think not, as I believe you to be mistress of your- 
self in those matters. Still, he keeps saying that I 
am to write to you and dissuade you from think- 
ing of him. I never saw papa make himself so un- 
easy about a thing of the kind before; he is usually 
very sarcastic on such subjects. 

*Mr. be hanged! I never thought very well 

of him, and I am much disposed to think very ill 
of him at this blessed minute. I have discussed the 
subject fully, for where is the use of being myster- 
ious and constrained.'^ — it is not worth while.' 

And yet again it is Ellen Nussey. 'Ten years ago 
I should have laughed at your account of the blun- 



78 THE THREE BRONTES 

der you made in mistaking the bachelor doctor of 
Bridlington for a married man. I should have cer- 
tainly thought you scrupulous over-much, and won- 
dered how you could possibly regret being civil to 
a decent individual merely because he happened to 
be single instead of double. Now, however, I can 
perceive that your scruples are founded on com- 
mon-sense. I know that if women wish to escape 
the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and 
look like marble or clay — cold, expressionless, 
bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, 
sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, dis- 
gust, are alike construed by the world into the 
attempt to' (I regret to say that Charlotte wrote) 
'to hook a husband.' 

Later, she has to advise her friend Mr. Williams 
as to a career for his daughter Louisa. And here 
she is miles ahead of her age, the age that consid- 
ered marriage the only honourable career for a wo- 
man. * Your daughters — no more than your sons — 
should be a burden on your hands. Your daughters 
— as much as your sons — should aim at making 
their way honourably through life. Do you not wish 
to keep them at home. Believe me, teachers may 
be hard- worked, ill-paid and despised, but the girl 
who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than 
the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a 
school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in hum- 
ble but in affluent houses, families of daughters sit- 



THE THREE BRONTES 79 

ting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from 
my heart. It is doubtless well — very well — if Fate 
decrees them a happy marriage; but, if otherwise, 
give their existence some object, their time some 
occupation, or the peevishness of disappointment, 
and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly de- 
grade their nature. . . . Lonely as I am, how 
should I be if Providence had never given me cour- 
age to adopt a career . . . ? How should I be with 
youth past, sisters lost, a resident in a moorland 
parish where there is not a single educated family? 
In that case I should have no world at all. As it is, 
something like a hope and a motive sustains me 
still. I wish all your daughters — I wish every 
woman in England, had also a hope and a motive.' 
Whatever the views of Charlotte Bronte's hero- 
ines may or may not have been, these were her own 
views — sober, sincere, and utterly dispassionate. 
Mrs. Oliphant set them aside, either in criminal 
carelessness, or with still more criminal delibera- 
tion, because they interfered with her theory. They 
are certainly not the views of a woman given to 
day-dreaming and window-gazing. Lucy Snowe 
may have had time for window-gazing, but not 
Charlotte Bronte, what with her writing and her 
dusting, sweeping, ironing, bed-making, and taking 
the eyes out of the potatoes for poor old Tabby, 
who was too blind to see them. Window-gazing of 
all things! Mrs. Oliphant could not have fixed 



80 THE THREE BRONTES 

upon a habit more absurdly at variance with 
Charlotte's character. 

For she was pure, utterly and marvellously pure 
from sentimentalism, which was (and she knew it) 
the worst vice of the Victorian age. Mr. Leslie 
Stephen said that *Miss Bronte's sense of humour 
was but feeble.' It was robust enough when it 
played with sentimentalists. But as for love, for 
passion, she sees it with a tragic lucidity that is 
almost a premonition. And her attitude was by no 
means that of the foredoomed spinster, making 
necessity her virtue. There was no necessity. She 
had at least four suitors (quite a fair allowance for 
a little lady in a lonely parish), and she refused 
them all. Twice in her life, in her tempestuous 
youth, and at a crisis of her affairs, she chose 'de- 
pendence upon coarse employers' before matri- 
mony. She was shrewd, lucid, fastidious, and saw 
the men she knew without any glamour. To the 
cold but thoroughly presentable Mr. Henry Nus- 
sey she replied thus : ' It has always been my habit 
to study the character of those among whom I 
chance to be thrown, and I think I know yours and 
can imagine what description of woman would suit 
you for a wife. The character should not be too 
marked, ardent and original, her temper should be 
mild, her piety undoubted, and her personal attrac- 
tions sufficient to please your eyes and gratify your 
just pride. As for me you do not know me . . .* 



THE THREE BRONTES 81 

She was only three and twenty when she wrote 
that, with the prospect of Stonegappe before her. 
For she had not, and could not have for him, *that 
intense attachment which would make me willing 
to die for him; and if ever I marry it must be in 
that light of adoration that I will regard my hus- 
band.' Later, in her worst loneliness she refused 
that ardent Mr. Taylor, who courted her by the 
novel means of newspapers sent with violent and 
unremitting regularity through the post. He rep- 
resented to some degree the larger life of intel- 
lectual interest. But he offended her fastidious- 
ness. She was sorry for the little man with his little 
newspaper, and that was all. She refused several 
times the man she ultimately married. He served 
a long apprenticeship to love, and Charlotte yielded 
to his distress rather than to her own passion. She 
describes her engaged state as *very calm, very 
expectant. What I taste of happiness is of the so- 
berest order. I trust to love my husband. I am 
grateful for his tender love for me . . . Providence 
offers me this destiny. Doubtless then it is the 
best for me.* 

These are not the words, nor is this the behaviour 
of Mrs. Oliphant's Charlotte Bronte, the forlorn 
and desperate victim of the obsession of matri- 
mony. 

I do not say that Charlotte Bronte had not what 
is called a 'temperament'; her genius would not 



82 THE THREE BRONTES 

have been what it was without it; she herself would 
have been incomplete; but there never was a woman 
of genius who had her temperament in more com- 
plete subjection to her character; and it is her char- 
acter that you have to reckon with at every turn. 

The little legends and the little theories have 
gone far enough. And had they gone no farther 
they would not have mattered much. They would 
at least have left Charlotte Bronte's genius to its 
own mystery. 

But her genius was the thing that irritated, the 
enigmatic, inexplicable thing. Talent in a woman 
you can understand, there 's a formula for it — 
tout talent defemme est un bonheur manque. So when 
a woman's talent baffles you, your course is plain: 
cherchez Vhomme. Charlotte's critics argued that 
if you could put your finger on the man you would 
have the key to the mystery. This, of course, was 
arguing that her genius was, after all, only a super- 
ior kind of talent; but some of them had already 
begun to ask themselves, Was it, after all, anything 
more? So they began to look for the man. They 
were certain by this time that there was one. 

The search was difficult; for Charlotte had con- 
cealed him well. But they found him at last in M. 
Constantin Heger, the little Professor of the Pen- 
sionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. Sir 
Wemyss Reid had suggested a love-affair in Brus- 



THE THREE BRONTES 83 

sels to account for Charlotte's depression, which 
was unfavourable to his theory of the happy life. 
Mr. Leyland seized upon the idea, for it nourished 
his theory that Branwell was an innocent lamb 
who had never caused his sisters a moment's misery. 
They made misery for themselves out of his harm- 
less peccadillos. Mr. Angus Mackay in The Brontes, 
Fact and Fiction, gives us this fiction for a fact. He 
is pleased with what he calls the 'pathetic signi- 
ficance' of his 'discovery.' There was somebody, 
there had to be, and it had to be M. Heger, for there 
was n't anybody else. Mr. Mackay draws back the 
veil with a gesture and reveals — the love-affair. 
He is very nice about it, just as nice as ever he can 
be. 'We see her,' he says, 'sore wounded in her 
affections, but unconquerable in her will. The dis- 
covery . . . does not degrade the noble figure we 
know so well. . . . The moral of her greatest works 
— that conscience must reign absolute at whatever 
cost — acquires a greater force when we realise 
how she herself came through the furnace of temp- 
tation with marks of torture on her, but with no 
stain on her soul.' 

This is all very well, but the question is: did 
Charlotte come through a furnace? Did she suffer 
from a great and tragic passion.'* It may have been 
so. For all we know she may have been in fifty 
furnaces; she may have gone from one fit of tragic 
passion to another. Only (apart from gossip, and 



84 THE THREE BRONTES 

apart from the argument from the novels, which 
begs the question) we have no evidence to prove it. 
What we have points all the other way. 

Gossip apart, believers in the tragic passion have 
nourished their theory chiefly on that celebrated 
passage in a letter of Charlotte's to Ellen Nussey: 
* I returned to Brussels after aunt's death, prompted 
by what then seemed an irresistible impulse. I was 
punished for my selfish folly by a withdrawal for 
more than two years of happiness and peace of 
mind.' 

Here we have the great disclosure. By * irresist- 
ible impulse' and * selfish folly,' Charlotte could 
only mean indulgence in an illegitimate passion for 
M. Heger's society. Peace of mind bears but one 
interpretation. 

Mr. Clement Shorter, to his infinite credit, will 
have none of this. He maintains very properly that 
the passage should be left to bear the simple con- 
struction that Miss Nussey and Mr. Nicholls put 
upon it. But I would go farther. I am convinced 
that not only does that passage bear that construc- 
tion, but that it will not bear the weight of any 
other. 

In eighteen-forty-two Charlotte's aunt died, and 
Charlotte became the head of her father's house- 
hold. She left her father's house in a time of trouble, 
prompted by *an irresistible impulse' towards 
what we should now call self-development. Char- 



THE THREE BRONTES 85 

lotte, more than two years later, in a moment of 
retrospective morbidity, called it * selfish folly.* In 
that dark mid- Victorian age it was sin in any 
woman to leave her home if her home required her. 
And with her aunt dead, and her brother Branwell 
drowning his grief for his relative in drink, and her 
father going blind, and beginning in his misery to 
drink a little too, Charlotte felt that her home did 
require her. Equally she felt that either Emily or 
she had got to turn out and make a living, and 
since it could n't possibly be Emily it must be she. 
The problem would have been quite simple even 
for Charlotte — but she wanted to go. Therefore her 
tender conscience vacillated. When you remember 
that Charlotte Bronte's conscience was, next to her 
genius, the largest, and at the same time the most 
delicate part of her, and that her love for her own 
people was a sacred passion, her words are suf- 
ficiently charged with meaning. A passion for 
M. Heger is, psychologically speaking, superfluous. 
You can prove anything by detaching words from 
their context. The letter from which that passage 
has been torn is an answer to Ellen Nussey's sug- 
gestions of work for Charlotte. Charlotte says *any 
project which infers the necessity of my leaving 
home is impracticable to me. If I could leave home 
I should not be at Ha worth now. I know life is 
passing away, and I am doing nothing, earning no- 
thing — a very bitter knowledge it is at moments 



86 THE THREE BRONTES 

— but I see no way out of the mist'; and so on for 
another line or two, and then: 'These ideas sting 
me keenly sometimes; but whenever I consult my 
conscience it aflSrms that I am doing right in stay- 
ing at home, and bitter are its upbraidings when I 
yield to an eager desire for release.' And then, the 
passage quoted ad nauseam, to support the legend 
of M. Heger. 

A 'total withdrawal for more than two years of 
happiness and peace of mind.' This letter is dated 
October 1846 — more than two years since her 
return from Brussels in January, eighteen-forty- 
four. In those two years her father was threatened 
with total blindness, and her brother Branwell 
achieved his destiny. The passage refers unmis- 
takably to events at Haworth. It is further illum- 
inated by another passage from an earlier letter. 
Ellen Nussey is going through the same crisis — 
torn between duty to herself and duty to her peo- 
ple. She asks Charlotte's advice, and Charlotte 
gives judgment: 'The right path is that which 
necessitates the greatest sacrifice of self-interest.' 
The sacrifice, observe, not of happiness, not of 
passion, but of self-interest, the development of 
self. It was self-development, and not passion, not 
happiness, that she went to Brussels for. 

And Charlotte's letters from Brussels — from 
the scene of passion in the year of crisis, eighteen- 
forty-three — suflSciently reveal the nature of the 



THE THREE BRONTES 87 

trouble there. Charlotte was alone in the Pension- 
nat without Emily. Emily was alone at Ha worth. 
The few friends she had in Brussels left soon after 
her arrival. She was alone in Brussels, and her 
homesickness was terrible. You can trace the mal- 
ady in all its stages. In March she writes: 'I ought 
to consider myself well off, and to be thankful for 
my good fortune. I hope I am thankful' (clearly 
she 'is n't thankful in the least!), 'and if I could 
always keep up my spirits and never feel lonely or 
long for companionship or friendship, or whatever 
they call it, I should do very well.' In the same 
letter you learn that she is giving English lessons 
to M. Heger and his brother-in-law, M. Chapelle. 
'If you could see and hear the efforts I make to 
teach them to pronounce like Englishmen, and 
their unavailing attempts to imitate, you would 
laugh to all eternity.' Charlotte is at first amused at 
the noises made by M. Heger and his brother-in-law. 
In May the noises made by Monsieur fail to 
amuse. Still, she is 'indebted to him for all the 
pleasure or amusement' that she had, and in spite 
of her indebtedness, she records a 'total want of 
companionship.' 'I lead an easeful, stagnant, silent 
life, for which ... I ought to be very thankful' 
(but she is not). May I point out that though you 
may be * silent ' in the first workings of a tragic and 
illegitimate passion, you are not 'stajsnant,' and 
certainly not 'easeful.' 



88 THE THREE BRONTES 

At the end of May she finds out that Madame 
Heger does not like her, and Monsieur is *won- 
drously influenced' by Madame. Monsieur has in 
a great measure * withdrawn the light of his coun- 
tenance,' but Charlotte apparently does not care. 
In August the vacances are at hand, and everybody 
but Charlotte is going home. She is consequently 
*in low spirits; earth and heaven are dreary and 
empty to me at this moment.' . . . *I can hardly 
write, I have such a dreary weight at my heart.' 
But she will see it through. She will stay some 
months longer 'till I have acquired German.' And 
at the end: 'Everybody is abundantly civil, but 
homesickness comes creeping over me. I cannot 
shake it off.' That was in September, in M. Heger's 
absence. Later, she tells Emily how she went into 
the cathedral and made 'a real confession to see 
what it was like.* Charlotte's confession has been 
used to bolster up the theory of the 'temptation.' 
Unfortunately for the theory it happened in Sep- 
tember, when M. Heger and temptation were not 
there. In October she finds that she no longer 
trusts Madame Heger. At the same time 'solitude 
oppresses me to an excess.' She gave notice, and 
M. Heger flew into a passion and commanded her 
to stay. She stayed very much against, not her 
conscience, but her will. In the same letter and 
the same connection she says, 'I have much to 
say — many little odd things, queer and puzzling 




■^yi€'- ^!?xy^^.i^n^^f^t:^T^^-t' 



THE THREE BRONTES 89 

enough — which I do not like to trust to a letter, 
but which one day perhaps, or rather one evening 
— if ever we should find ourselves by the fireside 
at Haworth or Brookroyd, with our feet on the 
fender curling our hair — I may communicate to 
you.' 

Charlotte is now aware of a situation; she is 
interested in it, intellectually, not emotionally. 

In November: 'Twinges of homesickness cut me 
to the heart, now and then.' On holidays *the 
silence and loneliness of all the house weighs down 
one's spirits like lead . . . Madame Heger, good 
and kind as I have described her' {i.e. for all her 
goodness and kindness), 'never comes near me on 
these occasions.' . . . *She is not colder to me than 
she is to the other teachers, but they are less de- 
pendent on her than I am.' But the situation is 
becoming clearer. Charlotte is interested. *I fancy 
I begin to perceive the reason of this mighty dis- 
tance and reserve; it sometimes makes me laugh, 
and at other times nearly cry. When I am sure of 
it I will tell you.' 

There can be no doubt that before she left Brus- 
sels Charlotte was sure; but there is no record of 
her ever having told. 

The evidence from the letters is plain enough. 
But the first thing that the theorist does is to 
mutilate letters. He suppresses all those parts of 
a correspondence which tell against his theory. 



90 THE THREE BRONTES 

When these torn and bleeding passages are restored 
piously to their contexts they are destructive to the 
legend of tragic passion. They show (as Mr. Clem- 
ent Shorter has pointed out) that throughout her 
last year at Brussels Charlotte Bronte saw hardly 
anything of M. Heger. They also show that before 
very long Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that 
Madame had arranged it so, and that it was not so 
much the absence of Monsieur that disturbed her 
as the extraordinary behaviour of Madame. And 
they show that from first to last she was incurably 
homesick. 

Now if Charlotte had been in any degree, lat- 
ently, or increasingly, or violently in love with M. 
Heger, she would have been as miserable as you 
like in M. Heger's house, but she would not have 
been homesick; she would not, I think, have wor- 
ried quite so much about Madame's behaviour; 
and she would have found the clue to it sooner 
than she did. 

To me it is all so simple and self-evident that, if 
the story were not revived periodically, if it had 
not been raked up again only the other day,^ there 
would be no need to dwell upon anything so pitiful 
and silly. 

It rests first and foremost on gossip, silly, pitiful 
gossip and conjecture. Gossip in England, gossip 

^ See The Key to the Bronte Works, by J. Malham-Dembleby, 
1911. 



THE THREE BRONTES 91 

in Brussels, conjecture all round. Above all, it 
rests on certain feline hints supplied by Madame 
Heger and her family. Charlotte's friends were 
always playfully suspecting her of love-affairs. 
They could never put their fingers on the man, and 
they missed M. Heger. It would never have oc- 
curred to their innocent mid-Victorian minds to 
suspect Charlotte of an attachment to a married 
man. It would not have occurred to Charlotte to 
suspect herself of it. But Madame Heger was a 
Frenchwoman, and she had not a mid- Victorian 
mind, and she certainly suspected Charlotte of an 
attachment, a flagrant attachment to M. Heger. 
It is well known that Madame made statements to 
that effect, and it is admitted on all hands that 
Madame had been jealous. It may fairly be con- 
jectured that it was M. Heger and not Charlotte 
who gave her cause, slight enough in all conscience, 
but suflScient for Madame Heger. She did not 
understand these Platonic relations between Eng- 
lish teachers and their French professors. She had 
never desired Platonic relations with anybody her- 
self, and she saw nothing but annoyance in them 
for everybody concerned. Madame's attitude is 
the clue to the mystery, the clue that Charlotte 
found. She accused the dead Charlotte of an ab- 
surd and futile passion for her husband; she stated 
that she had had to advise the living Charlotte 
to moderate the ardour of her admiration for the 



92 THE THREE BRONTES 

engaging professor; but the truth, as Charlotte in 
the end discovered, was that for a certain brief pe- 
riod Madame was preposterously jealous. M. Heger 
confessed as much when he asked Charlotte to ad- 
dress her letters to him at the Athenee Royale 
instead of the Pensionnat. The correspondence, he 
said, was disagreeable to his wife. 

Why, in heaven's name, disagreeable, if Madame 
Heger suspected Charlotte of an absurd and futile 
passion? And why should Madame Heger have 
been jealous of an absurd and futile woman, a 
woman who had seen so little of Madame Heger's 
husband? and who was then in England? I cannot 
agree with Mr. Shorter that M. Heger regarded 
Charlotte with indifference. He was a Frenchman, 
and he had his vanity, and no doubt the frank 
admiration of his brilliant pupil appealed to it 
vividly in moments of conjugal depression. Char- 
lotte herself must have had some attraction for 
M. Heger. Madame perceived the appeal and the 
attraction, and she was jealous ; therefore her inter- 
pretation of appearances could not have been so 
unflattering 'to Charlotte as she made out. Ma- 
dame, in fact, suspected, on her husband's part, 
the dawning of an attachment. We know nothing 
about M. Heger's attachment, and we have n't any 
earthly right to know; but from all that is known 
of M. Heger it is certain that, if it was not entirely 
intellectual, not entirely that ^affection presque 



THE THREE BRONTES 93 

paternelle' that he once professed, it was entirely 
restrained and innocent and honourable. It is 
Madame Heger with her jealousy who has given the 
poor gentleman away. Monsieur's state of mind — 
extremely temporary — probably accounted for 
'those many odd little things, queer and puzzling 
enough,' which Charlotte would not trust to a let- 
ter; matter for curl-paper confidences and no more. 

Of course there is the argument from the novels, 
from The Professor, from Jane Eyre, from Villette. 
I have not forgotten it. But really it begs the ques- 
tion. It moves in an extremely narrow and an 
extremely vicious circle. Jane Eyre was tried in a 
furnace of temptation, therefore Charlotte must 
have been tried. Lucy Snowe and Frances Henri 
loved and suffered in Brussels. Therefore Charlotte 
must have loved and suffered there. And if Char- 
lotte loved and suffered and was tried in a furnace 
of temptation, that would account for Frances and 
for Lucy and for Jane. 

No; the theorists who have insisted on this tragic 
passion have not reckoned with Charlotte Bronte's 
character, and its tremendous power of self-repres- 
sion. If at Brussels any disastrous tenderness had 
raised its head it would n't have had a chance to 
grow an inch. But Charlotte had large and lumin- 
ous ideas of friendship. She was pure, utterly 
pure from all the illusions and subtleties and cor- 
ruptions of the sentimentalist, and she could trust 



V 



94 THE THREE BRONTES 

herself in friendship. She brought to it ardours and 
vehemences that she would never have allowed to 
love. If she let herself go in her infrequent inter- 
course with M. Heger, it was because she was so 
far from feeling in herself the possibility of passion. 
That was why she could say, *I think, however 
long I live, I shall not forget what the parting with 
M. Heger cost me. It grieved me so much to grieve 
him who has been so true, kind, and disinterested 
a friend.' That was how she could bring herself 
to write thus to Monsieur: *Savez-vous ce que je 
ferais. Monsieur .^^ J'ecrirais un livre et je le dedie- 
rais a mon maitre de litterature, au seul maitre 
que j'aie jamias eu — a vous. Monsieur! Je vous ai 
dit souvent en frangais combien je vous respecte, 
combien je suis redevable a votre bonte, a vos con- 
seils. Je voudrais le dire une fois en anglais . . . le 
souvenir de vos bontes ne s'effacera jamais de ma 
memoire, et tant que ce souvenir durera, le respect 
que vous m'avez inspire durera aussi.' For 'je vous 
respecte^ we are not entitled to read 'je vous aime.' 
Charlotte was so made that kindness shown her 
moved her to tears of gratitude. When Charlotte 
said * respect' she meant it. Her feeling for M. 
Heger was purely what Mr. Matthew Arnold said 
religion was, an affair of * morality touched with 
emotion.' All her utterances, where there is any 
feeling in them, no matter what, have a poignancy, 
a vibration which is Brontesque and nothing more. 



THE THREE BRONTES 95 

And this Brontesque quality is what the theorists 
have (like Madame Heger, and possibly Monsieur) 
neither allowed for nor understood. 

For this 'fiery-hearted Vestal,' this virgin, sharp- 
tongued and sharper-eyed, this scorner of amorous 
curates, had a genius for friendship. This genius, 
like her other genius, was narrow in its range and 
opportunity, and for that all the more ardent and 
intense. It fed on what came to its hand. It could 
even grow, like her other genius, with astounding 
vitality out of strange and hostile soil. She seems 
to have had many friends, obscure and great; the 
obscure, the Dixons, the Wheelrights, the Taylors, 
the Nusseys, out of all proportion to the great. 
But properly speaking she had only two friends, 
Mary Taylor, and Ellen Nussey, the enchanting, 
immortal 'Nel.' 

There is something at first sight strange and 
hostile about Mary Taylor, the energetic, practi- 
cal, determined, terribly robust person you see so 
plainly trying, in the dawn of their acquaintance, 
to knock the nonsense out of Charlotte. Mary 
Taylor had no appreciation of the Brontesque. 
When Charlotte told Mary Taylor that at Cowan 
Bridge she used to stand in the burn on a stone, 
to watch the water flow by, Mary Taylor told Char- 
lotte that she should have gone fishing. When Jane 
Eyre appeared she wrote to Charlotte in a strain 



96 THE THREE BRONTES 

that is amusing to posterity. There is a touch of 
condescension in her praise. She is evidently sur- 
prised at anything so great coming out of Char- 
lotte. *It seemed to me incredible that you had 
actually written a book.' *You are very different 
from me/ she says, 'in having no doctrine to 
preach. It is impossible to squeeze a moral out of 
your production.' She is thinking of his prototype 
when she criticises the character of St. John Rivers. 
*A missionary either goes into his office for a piece 
of bread, or he goes for enthusiasm, and that is 
both too good and too bad a quality for St. John. 
It 's a bit of your absurd charity to believe in such 
a man.' As an intellectual woman Mary Taylor 
realised Charlotte Bronte's intellect, but it is doubt- 
ful if she ever fully realised what, beyond an intel- 
lect, she had got hold of in her friend. She was a 
woman of larger brain than Ellen Nussey, she was 
loyal and warm-hearted to the last degree, but it 
was not given to her to see in Charlotte Bronte 
what Ellen Nussey, little as you would have ex- 
pected it, had seen. She did not keep her letters. 
She burnt them *in a fit of caution,' which may 
have been just as well. 

But Mary Taylor is important. She had, among 
her more tender qualities, an appalling frankness. 
It was she who told poor little Charlotte that she 
was very ugly. Charlotte never forgot it. You can 
feel in her letters, in her novels, in her whole 



THE THREE BRONTES 97 

nature, the long reverberation of the shock. She 
said afterwards: * You did me a great deal of good, 
Polly,' by which she meant that Polly had done her 
an infinity of harm. 

Her friends all began by trying to do her good. 
Even Ellen Nussey tried. Charlotte is very kindly 
cautioned against being 'tempted by the fondness 
of my sisters to consider myself of too much im- 
portance,' and in a parenthesis Ellen Nussey begs 
her not to be offended. *0h! Ellen,' Charlotte 
writes, 'do you think I could be offended by any 
good advice you may give me.^^' She thanks her 
heartily, and loves her ' if possible all the better for 
it.' Ellen Nussey in her turn asks Charlotte to tell 
her of her faults and 'cease flattering her.' Char- 
lotte very sensibly refuses ; and it is not till she has 
got away from her sisters that her own heart- 
searchings begin. They are mainly tiresome, but 
there is a flash of revelation in her reply to 'the 
note you sent me with the umbrella.' 'My darling, 
if I were like you, I should have to face Zionwards, 
though prejudice and error might occasionally 
fling a mist over the glorious vision before me, for 
with all your single-hearted sincerity you have 
your faults, but I am not like you. If you knew my 
thoughts; the dreams that absorb me, and the fiery 
imagination that at times eats me up, and makes 
me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you 
would pity me, and I dare say despise me.' Miss 



98 THE THREE BRONTES 

Nussey writes again, and Charlotte trembles *all 
over with excitement' after reading her note. *I 
will no longer shrink from your questions,' she 
replies. *I do wish to be better than I am. I pray 
fervently sometimes to be made so . . . this very 
night I will pray as you wish me.' 

But Charlotte is not in the least like Ellen Nus- 
sey, and she still refuses to be drawn into any 
return of this dangerous play with "a friend's con- 
science and her nerves. *I will not tell you all I 
think and feel about you, Ellen. I will preserve 
unbroken that reserve which alone enables me to 
maintain a decent character for judgment; but for 
that, I should long ago have been set down by all 
who know me as a Frenchified fool. You have 
been very kind to me of late, and gentle, and you 
have spared me those little sallies of ridicule, 
which, owing to my miserable and wretched touchi- 
ness of character, used formerly to make me wince, 
as if I had been touched with hot iron. Things that 
nobody else cares for enter into my mind and rankle 
there like venom. I know these feelings are absurd, 
and therefore I try to hide them, but they only 
sting the deeper for concealment. I 'm an idiot ! ' 

Miss Nussey seems to have preserved her calm 
through all the excitement and to have never 
turned a hair. But nothing could have been worse 
for Charlotte than this sort of thing. It goes on 
for years. It began in eighteen-thirty-three, the 



THE THREE BRONTES 99 

third year of their friendship, when she was seven- 
teen. In 'thirty-seven it is at its height. Charlotte 
writes from Dewsbury Moor: *If I could always 
live with you, if your lips and mine could at the 
same time drink the same draught at the same pure 
fountain of mercy, I hope, I trust, I might one day 
become better, far better than my evil, wandering 
thoughts, my corrupt heart, cold to the spirit and 
warm to the flesh, will now permit me to be. I often 
plan the pleasant life we might lead, strengthening 
each other in the power of self-denial, that hallowed 
and glowing devotion which the past Saints of God 
often attained to.' 

Now a curious and interesting thing is revealed 
by this correspondence. These religious fervours 
and depressions come on the moment Charlotte 
leaves Haworth and disappear as soon as she re- 
turns. All those letters were written from Roe 
Head or Dewsbury Moor, while the Haworth let- 
ters of the same period are sane and light-hearted. 
And when she is fairly settled at Haworth, instead 
of emulating the Saints of God, she and Miss Nus- 
sey are studying human nature and the art of flirta- 
tion as exhibited by curates. Charlotte adminis- 
ters to her friend a formidable amount of worldly 
wisdom, thus avenging herself for the dance Miss 
Nussey led her round the throne of grace. 

For, though that morbid excitement and intro- 
spection belonged solely to Charlotte's days of 



100 THE THREE BRONTES 

exile. Miss Nussey was at the bottom of it. Mary 
Taylor would have been a far robuster influence. 
But Charlotte's friendship for Mary Taylor, warm 
as it was, strikes cold beside her passionate affec- 
tion for Ellen Nussey. She brought her own fire to 
that, and her own extraordinary capacity for pain. 
Her letters show every phase of this friendship, its 
birth, its unfolding; and then the sudden leaping 
of the flame, its writhing and its torture. She 
writes with a lover's ardour and impatience. * Write 
to me very soon and dispel my uncertainty, or I 
shall get impatient, almost irritable.' 'I read your 
letter with dismay. Ellen — what shall I do with- 
out you? Why are we to be denied each other's 
society ? It is an inscrutable fatality. . . . Why 
are we to be divided .f^' (She is at Roe Head, and 
Roe Head suggests the answer.) 'Surely, Ellen, 
it must be because we are in danger of loving each 
other too well — of losing sight of the Creator in 
idolatry of the creature.' She prays to be resigned, 
and records *a sweet, placid sensation like those 
that I remember used to visit me when I was a 
little child, and on Sunday evenings in summer 
stood by the window reading the life of a certain 
French nobleman who attained a purer and higher 
degree of sanctity than has been known since the 
days of the Early Martyrs. I thought of my own 
Ellen — ' *I wish I could see you, my darling; I 
have lavished the warmest affections of a very hot. 



THE THREE BRONTES 101 

tenacious heart upon you; if you grow cold, it is 
over.' She was only twenty-one. 

A few more years and the leaping and the writh- 
ing and the torture cease, the fire burns to a steady, 
inextinguishable glow. There is gaiety in Char- 
lotte's tenderness. She is 'infuriated' on finding a 
jar in her trunk. *At first I hoped it was empty, 
but when I found it heavy and replete, I could 
have hurled it all the way back to Birstall. How- 
ever, the inscription A. B. softened me much. You 
ought first to be tenderly kissed, and then as ten- 
derly whipped. Emily is just now sitting on the 
floor of the bedroom where I am writing, looking 
at her apples. She smiled when I gave them and 
the collar as your presents, with an expression at 
once well pleased and slightly surprised.' 

The religious fervours and the soul-searchings 
have ceased long ago, so has Miss Nussey's brief 
spiritual ascendency. But the friendship and the 
letters never cease. They go on for twenty years, 
through exile and suffering, through bereavement, 
through fame and through marriage, uninterrupted 
and, except for one brief period, unabridged. There 
is nothing in any biography to compare with those 
letters to Ellen Nussey. If Charlotte Bronte had 
not happened to be a great genius as well as a great 
woman, they alone would have furnished forth her 
complete biography. There is no important detail 
of her mere life that is not given in them. Mrs. 



102 THE THREE BRONTES 



Gaskell relied almost entirely on them, and on in- 
formation supplied to her by Miss Nussey. And 
each critic and biographer who followed her, from 
Sir Wemyss Reid to Mr. Clement Shorter, drew 
from the same source. Miss Nussey was almost the 
only safe repository of material relating to Char- 
lotte Bronte. She had possessed hundreds of her 
letters and, with that amiable weakness which was 
the defect of her charming quality, she was unable 
to withhold any of them from the importunate 
researcher. There seems to have been nothing, 
except one thing, that Charlotte did not talk about 
to Miss Nussey when they sat with their feet on 
the fender and their hair in curl-papers. That one 
thing was her writing. It is quite possible that in 
those curl-paper confidences Miss Nussey learnt 
the truth about Charlotte's friend, M. Heger. She 
never learnt anything about Charlotte's genius. 
In everything that concerned her genius Charlotte 
was silent and secret with her friend. That was the 
line, the very sharp and impassable line she drew 
between her *dear, dear Ellen,' her * dearest Nel,' 
and her sisters, Anne and Emily. The freemasonry 
of friendship ended there. You may search in vain 
through even her later correspondence with Miss 
Nussey for any more than perfunctory and ex- 
traneous allusions to her works. It was as if they 
had never been. Every detail of her daily life is 
there, the outer and the inner things, the sewing 



^ 



THE THREE BRONTES 103 

and ironing and potato-peeling, together with mat- 
ters of the heart and soul, searchings, experiences, 
agonies; the figures of her father, her brother, her 
sisters, move there, vivid and alive; and old Tabby 
and the curates; and the very animals. Keeper and 
Flossie, and the little black cat, Tom, that died and 
made Emily sorry; but of the one thing not a word. 
The letters to Ellen Nussey following the publica- 
tion of Jane Eyre, are all full of gossip about Miss 
Ringrose and the Robinsons. Presently Ellen hears 
a rumour of publication. Charlotte repudiates it 
and friction follows. 

Charlotte writes: *Dear Ellen, — Write another 
letter and explain that note of yours distinctly. 
. . . Let me know what you heard, and from 
whom you heard it. You do wrong to feel pain from 
any circumstance, or to suppose yourself slighted. 
. . . ' * Dear Ellen, — All I can say to you about 
a certain matter is this : the report . . . must have 
had its origin in some absurd misunderstanding. I 
have given no one a right to affirm or hint in the 
most distant manner that I am publishing (hum- 
bug !) . Whoever has said it — if any one has, which 
I doubt — is no friend of mine. Though twenty 
books were ascribed to me, I should own none, I 
scout the idea utterly. Whoever, after I have dis- 
tinctly rejected the charge, urges it upon me, will do 
an unkind and ill-bred thing.' If Miss Nussey is 
asked, she is authorised by Miss Bronte to say. 



104 THE THREE BRONTES 

'that she repels and disowns every accusation of 
the kind. You may add, if you please, that if any 
one has her confidence, you beHeve you have, and 
she has made no drivelling confessions to you on 
that subject.* 'Dear Ellen, — I shall begin by 
telling you that you have no right to be angry at 
the length of time I have suffered to slip by since 
receiving your last, without answering it; because 
you have often kept me waiting much longer, and 
having made this gracious speech, thereby obviat- 
ing reproaches, I will add that I think it a great 
shame, when you receive a long and thoroughly 
interesting letter, full of the sort of details you fully 
relish, to read the same with selfish pleasure, and 
not even have the manners to thank your corre- 
spondent, and express how very much you enjoyed 
the narrative. I did enjoy the narrative in your last 
very keenly. . . . Which of the Miss Woolers did 
you see at Mr. Allbutts.^' 

A beautiful but most unequal friendship. 'The 
sort of details you fully relish — ' How that phrase 
must have rankled! You can hear the passionate 
protest: 'Those details are not what I relish in the 
least. Putting me off with your Woolers and your 
Allbutts ! If only you had told me about Jane Eyre I ' 
For it turned out that all the time Mary Taylor 
had been told. The inference was that Mary Tay- 
lor, with her fits of caution, could be trusted. 

This silence of Charlotte's must have been most 



THE THREE BRONTES 105 

painful and incomprehensible to the poor Ellen 
who was Caroline Helstone. She had been the first 
to divine Charlotte's secret; for she kept the let- 
ters. She must have felt like some tender and wor- 
shipping'wif^ to whom all doors in the house of the 
beloved are thrown open, except the door of the 
sanctuary, which is persistently slammed in her 
charming face. There must have come to her mo- 
ments of terrible insight when she felt the danger 
and the mystery of the flaming spirit she had tried 
to hold. But Charlotte's friend can wear her half- 
pathetic immortality with grace. She could at 
least say; 'She told me things she never told anyone 
else. I have hundreds of her letters. And I had her 
heart.' 

Nothing so much as this correspondence reveals 
the appalling solitude in which the Brontes lived. 
Here is their dearest and most intimate friend, and 
she is one to whom they can never speak of the 
thing that interested them most. No doubt *our 
best plays mean secret plays'; but Charlotte, at 
any rate, suffered from this secrecy. There was 
nothing to counteract Miss Nussey's direful influ- 
ence on her spiritual youth. *Papa' highly ap- 
proved of the friendship. He wished it to continue, 
and it did; and it was the best that Charlotte had. 
I know few things more pathetic than the cry that 
Charlotte, at twenty-one, sent out of her solitude 



106 THE THREE BRONTES 

(with some verses) to Southey and to Wordsworth. 
Southey told her that * Literature cannot be the 
business of a woman*s life, and it ought not to be. 
The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the 
less leisure will she have for it, even as an accom- 
plishment and a recreation. To those duties you 
have not yet been called, and when you are you 
will be less eager for celebrity.' A sound, respect- 
able, bourgeois opinion so far, but Southey went 
farther. * Write poetry for its own sake,' he said; 
and he could hardly have said better. Charlotte 
treasured the letter, and wrote on the cover of it, 
* Southey 's advice, to be kept for ever.' Words- 
worth's advice, I am sorry to say, provoked her to 
flippancy. 

And that, out of the solitude, was all. Not the 
ghost, not the shadow of an Influence came to the 
three sisters. There never was genius that owed so 
little to influence as theirs. 

I know that in Charlotte's case there is said 
to have been an Influence. An Influence without 
which she would have remained for ever in obscur- 
ity, with Villette, with Shirley, with Jane Eyre, with 
The Professor, unborn, unconceived. 

Need I say that the Influence is — M. Heger? 

*The sojourn in Brussels,' says Mr. Clement 
Shorter, *made Miss Bronte an author,' and he is 
only following Sir Wemyss Reid, who was the first 



THE THREE BRONTES 107 

to establish Brussels as the turning-point. Mr. 
Shorter does not believe in M. Heger as the inspirer 
of passion, but he does believe in him as the in- 
spirer of genius. He thinks it exceedingly probable 
that had not circumstances led Charlotte Bronte 
to spend some time at Brussels not only would 'the 
world never have heard of her,' but it would never 
have heard of her sisters. He is quite certain about 
Charlotte anyhow; she could not have * arrived* 
had she not met M. Heger. *She went,' he says, 
*to Brussels full of the crude ambitions, the semi- 
literary impulses that are so common on the fringe 
of the writing world. She left Brussels a woman of 
genuine cultivation, of educated tastes, armed with 
just the equipment that was to enable her to write 
the books of which two generations of her country- 
men have been justly proud.' 

This is saying that Charlotte Bronte had no 
means of expression before she wrote devoirs under 
M. Heger. True, her genius did not find itself until 
after she left Brussels, that is to say, not until she 
was nearly thirty. I have not read any of her works 
as Lord Charles Albert Florian Wellesley, and I do 
not imagine they were works of genius. But that 
only means that Charlotte Bronte's genius took 
time. She was one of those novelists who do not 
write novels before they are nearly thirty. But 
she could write. Certain fragments of her very 
earliest work show that from the first she had not 



108 THE THREE BRONTES 

only the means, but very considerable mastery of 
expression. What is more, they reveal in germ the 
qualities that marked her style in its maturity. 
Her styles rather, for she had several. There is her 
absolutely simple style, in which she is perfect; her 
didactic style, her fantastic style, which are mere 
temporary aberrations; and her inspired style, in 
which at her worst she is merely flamboyant and 
redundant, and at her best no less than perfect. 
You will find a faint, embryonic foreshadowing 
of her perfections in the fragments given by Mrs. 
Gaskell. There is The History of the Year 1829, 
beginning: *Once Papa lent my sister Maria a book. 
It was an old geography book; she wrote on its 
blank leaf, *'Papa lent me this book." This book 
is a hundred and twenty years old; it is at this 
moment lying before me. While I write this I am 
in the kitchen of the Parsonage, Ha worth; Tabby, 
the servant, is washing up the breakfast things, 
and Anne, my youngest sister (Maria was my eld- 
est), is kneeling on a chair, looking at some cakes, 
which Tabby has been baking for us.' You cannot 
beat that for pure simplicity of statement. There 
is another fragment that might have come straight 
out of Jane Eyre. *One night, about the time when 
the cold sleet and stormy fogs of November are 
succeeded by the snowstorms and high piercing 
night-winds of confirmed winter, we were all sitting 
round the warm, blazing, kitchen fire, having just 



THE THREE BRONTES 109 

concluded a quarrel with Tabby concerning the 
propriety of lighting a candle, from which she came 
off victorious, no candle having been produced.' 
And there is a dream -story that Mr. Clement 
Shorter gives. She is in the 'Mines of Cracone,' 
under the floor of the sea. *But in the midst of all 
this magnificence I felt an indescribable sense of 
fear and terror, for the sea raged above us, and by 
the awful and tumultuous noises of roaring winds 
and dashing waves, it seemed as if the storm was 
violent. And now the massy pillars groaned be- 
neath the pressure of the ocean, and the glittering 
arches seemed about to be overwhelmed. When I 
heard the rushing waters and saw a mighty flood 
rolling towards me I gave a loud shriek of terror.' 
The dream changes : she is in a desert full of barren 
rocks and high mountains, where she sees 'by the 
light of his own fiery eyes a royal lion rousing him- 
self from his kingly slumbers. His terrible eye was 
fixed upon me, and the desert rang, and the rocks 
echoed with the tremendous roar of fierce delight 
which he uttered as he sprang towards me.' And 
there is her letter to the editor of one of their 
'Little Magazines': 'Sir, — It is well known that 
the Genii have declared that unless they perform 
certain arduous duties every year, of a mysterious 
nature, all the worlds in the firmament will be 
burnt up, and gathered together in one mighty 
globe, which will roll in solitary splendour through 



110 THE THREE BRONTES 

the vast wilderness of space, inhabited only by the 
four high princes of the Genii, till time shall be 
succeeded by Eternity; and the impudence of this 
is only to be paralleled by another of their asser- 
tions, namely, that by their magic might they can 
reduce the world to a desert, the purest waters to 
streams of livid poison, and the clearest lakes to 
stagnant water, the pestilential vapours of which 
shall slay all living creatures, except the blood- 
thirsty beast of the forest, and the ravenous bird 
of the rock. But that in the midst of this desola- 
tion the palace of the chief Genii shall rise sparkling 
in the wilderness, and the horrible howl of their 
war-cry shall spread over the land at morning, at 
noontide, and at night; but that they shall have 
their annual feast over the bones of the dead, and 
shall yearly rejoice with the joy of victors. I think, 
sir, that the horrible wickedness of this needs no 
remark, and therefore I hasten to subscribe my- 
self, etc' 

Puerile, if you like, and puerile all the stuff that 
Charlotte Bronte wrote before eighteen-forty-six; 
but her style at thirteen, in its very rhythms and 
cadences, is the unmistakable embryo of her style 
at thirty; and M. Heger no more cured her of its 
faults than he could teach her its splendours. 
Something that was not Brussels made Miss Bronte 
a prodigious author at thirteen. The mere mass of 
her Juvenilia testifies to a most ungovernable bent. 



1 



THE THREE BRONTES 111 

Read the list of works, appalling in their length, 
which this child produced in a period of fifteen 
months; consider that she produced nothing but 
melancholy letters during her * sojourn in Brussels'; 
and compare M. Heger's academic precepts with 
her practice, with the wild sweep and exuberance 
of her style when she has shaken him off, and her 
genius gets possession of her. 

I know there is a gulf fixed between Currer 
Bell and Charles Townsend, who succeeded Lord 
Charles Albert Florian Wellesley and the Marquis 
of Douro, about eigh teen-thirty-eight; but it is 
bridged by the later Poems which show Charlotte's 
genius struggling through a wrong medium to the 
right goal. She does not know — after the sojourn 
in Brussels she does not yet know — that her right 
medium is prose. She knew no more than she knew 
in November, eighteen-forty-one, when, on the eve 
of her flight from Haworth, she writes: *The plain 
fact is, I was not, I am not now, certain of my 
destiny.' It was not until two years after she had 
returned to Haworth that she received her cer- 
tainty. For posterity, overpowered by the labour 
of the Bronte specialists, it may seem as if Charlotte 
Bronte's genius owed everything to her flight from 
Haworth. In reality her flight merely coincided 
with the inevitable shooting of its wings; and the 
specialists have mistaken coincidence for destiny. 

Heaven only knows what would have happened 



112 THE THREE BRONTES 

to her genius if, blind to her destiny, she had re- 
mained in Brussels. For, once there, its wing- 
feathers left off growing. Its way was blocked by 
every conceivable hostile and obstructive thing. 
Madame Heger was hostile, and Monsieur, I think, 
purely obstructive. Emily saw through him, and 
denounced his method as fatal to all originality. 
Charlotte, to be sure, called him *my dear master, 
the only master that I ever had,' but if that was not 
her 'absurd charity,' it was only her Brontesque 
way. There was no sense in which he was her mas- 
ter. He taught her French; to the very last the 
habit of using *a few French words' was the King 
Charles's head in her manuscripts; and the French 
he taught her did her harm. The restraint he could 
and would have taught her she never learnt until 
her genius had had, in defiance and in spite of him, 
its full fling. 

And what a fling! It is the way of genius to look 
after itself. In spite of obstacles, Charlotte Bronte's 
took hold of every man and woman that crossed 
and barred its path, and ultimately it avenged itself 
on Monsieur and on Madame Heger. Those two 
were made for peaceful, honourable conjugal ob- 
scurity, but it was their luck to harbour a half- 
fledged and obstructed genius in their Pensionnat, 
a genius thirsting for experience; and somehow, 
between them, they contrived to make it suffer. 
That was their tragedy. Monsieur's case is piti- 



n 



THE THREE BRONTES 113 

ful; for he was kind and well-meaning, and he was 
fond of Charlotte; and yet, because of Charlotte, 
there is no peace for him in the place where he has 
gone. Her genius has done with him, but her ghost, 
like some malign and awful destiny, pursues him. 
No sooner does he sink back quiet in his grave than 
somebody unearths him. Why cannot he be allowed 
to rest, once for all, in his amiable unimportance.^ 

IP 

He became, poor man, important only by the use 
that Charlotte's genius made of him. It seized on 
him as it would have seized on any other interest- 
ing material that came its way. Without him we 
might have had another Rochester, and we should 
not have had any Paul Emanuel, which would have 
been a pity; that is all. 

There is hardly any hope that Bronte specialists 
will accept this view. For them the sojourn in 
Brussels will still stand as the turning - point in 
Charlotte Bronte's career. Yet for her, long after- 
wards, Brussels must have stood as the danger 
threatening it. She would have said, I think, that 
her sojourn in Haworth was the turning-point. It 
was destiny that turned Emily back to Haworth 
from the destruction that waited for her at Brus- 
sels, so that she conceived and brought forth 
Wuthering Heights; her own destiny that she 
secretly foreknew, consoling and beneiScent. And, 
no doubt, it was destiny of a sort, unforeknown, 
deceitful, apparently malignant, that sent Char- 



114 THE THREE BRONTES 

lotte back again to Brussels after her aunt's death. 
It wrung from her her greatest book, Villette. But 
Haworth, I think, would have wrung from her 
another, and perhaps a greater. 

For the first-fruits of the sojourn in Brussels was 
neither Villette nor Jane Eyre, but The Professor. 
And The Professor has none of the qualities of Jane 
Eyre or of Villette; it has none of the qualities of 
Charlotte's later work at all; above all, none of 
that master quality which M. Heger is supposed to 
have specially evoked. Charlotte, indeed, could not 
well have written a book more destructive to the 
legend of the upheaval, the tragic passion, the fur- 
nace of temptation and the flight. Nothing could be 
less like a furnace than the atmosphere of The Pro- 
fessor. From the first page to the last there is not 
one pulse, not one breath of passion in it. The blood- 
less thing comes coldly, slowly, tentatively, from 
the birth. It is almost as frigid as a devoir written 
under M. Heger's eye. The theorists, I notice, are 
careful not to draw attention to The Professor ; and 
they are wise, for attention drawn to The Professor 
makes sad work of their theory. 

Remember, on the theory, Charlotte Bronte has 
received her great awakening, her great enlighten- 
ment; she is primed with passion; the whole won- 
derful material of Villette is in her hand; she has 
before her her unique opportunity. You ought, on 



THE THREE BRONTES 115 

the theory, to see her hastening to it, a passionate 
woman, pouring out her own one and supreme 
experience, and, with the brand of Brussels on 
her, never afterwards really doing anything else. 
Whereas the first thing the impassioned Charlotte 
does (after a year of uninspired and ineffectual 
poetising) is to sit down and write The Prof essor ; 
a book, remarkable not by any means for its emo- 
tion, but for its cold and dispassionate observation. 
Charlotte eliminates herself, and is Crimsworth in 
order that she may observe Frances Henri the more 
dispassionately. She is inspired solely by the an- 
alytic spirit, and either cannot, or will not, let her- 
self go. But she does what she meant to do. She 
had it in mind to write, not a great work of imagin- 
ation, but a grey and sober book, and a grey and 
sober book is what she writes. A book concerned 
only with things and people she has seen and 
known; a book, therefore, from which passion and 
the poetry that passion is must be rigidly excluded, 
as belonging to the region of things not, strictly 
speaking, known. It is as if she had written The 
Professor in rivalry with her sister Anne, both of 
them austerely determined to put aside all imagin- 
ation and deal with experience and experience 
alone. Thus you obtain sincerity, you obtain truth. 
And with nothing but experience before her, she 
writes a book that has no passion in it, a book al- 
most as bloodless and as gentle as her sister Anne's. 



116 THE THREE BRONTES 

Let us not disparage The Professor. Charlotte 
herself did not disparage it. In her Preface she 
refused to solicit 'indulgence for it on the plea of 
a first attempt. A first attempt/ she says, 'it cer- 
tainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been 
previously worn in a practice of some years.' In 
that Preface she shows plainly that at the very 
outset of her career she had no sterner critic than 
herself; that she was aware of her sins and her 
temptations, and of the dangers that lurked for 
her in her imaginative style. ' In many a crude 
effort, destroyed almost as soon as composed, I 
had got over any such taste as I might have had 
for ornamented and decorated composition, and 
come to prefer what was plain and homely.' Ob- 
serve, it is not to the lessons of the 'master,' but 
to the creation and destruction that went on at 
Ha worth that she attributes this purgation. She 
is not aware of the extent to which she can trust 
her genius, of what will happen when she has fairly 
let herself go. She is working on a method that 
rules her choice of subject. 'I said to myself that 
my hero should work his way through life, as I had 
seen real, living men work theirs — that he should 
never get a shilling that he had not earned — that 
no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to 
wealth and high station; that whatever small com- 
petency he might gain should be won by the sweat 
of his brow; that before he could find so much as an 



THE THREE BRONTES 117 

arbour to sit down in, he should master at least 
half the ascent of the Hill Difficulty; that he should 
not marry even a beautiful girl or a lady of rank.' 

There was no fine madness in that method; but 
its very soundness and sanity show the admirable 
spirit in which Charlotte Bronte approached her 
art. She was to return to the method of The Pro- 
fessor again and yet again, when she suspected 
herself of having given imagination too loose a 
rein. The remarkable thing was that she should 
have begun with it. 

And in some respects The Professor is more fin- 
ished, better constructed than any of her later 
books. There is virtue in its extreme sobriety. 
Nothing could be more delicate and firm than the 
drawing of Frances Henri ; nothing in its grey style 
more admirable than the scene where Crimsworth, 
having found Frances in the cemetery, takes her 
to her home in the Rue Notre Dame aux Neiges. 

* Stepping over a little mat of green wool, I found 
myself in a small room with a painted floor and a 
square of green carpet in the middle; the articles of 
furniture were few, but all bright and exquisitely 
clean — order reigned through its narrow limits — 
such order as it suited my punctilious soul to be- 
hold. . . . Poor the place might be; poor truly it 
was, but its neatness was better than elegance, and 
had but a bright little fire shone on that clean 
hearth, I should have deemed it more attractive 



118 THE THREE BRONTES 

than a palace. No fire was there, however, and 
no fuel laid ready to light; the lace-mender was un- 
able to allow herself that indulgence. . . . Frances 
went into an inner room to take off her bonnet, 
and she came out a model of frugal neatness, with 
her well -fitting black stuff dress, so accurately- 
defining her elegant bust and taper waist, with her 
spotless white collar turned back from a fair and 
shapely neck, with her plenteous brown hair ar- 
ranged in smooth bands on her temples and in 
a large Grecian plait behind: ornaments she had 
none — neither brooch, ring, nor ribbon; she did 
well enough without them — perfection of fit, pro- 
portion of form, grace of carriage, agreeably sup- 
plied their place.' Frances lights a fire, having 
fetched wood and coal in a basket. 

*"It is her whole stock, and she will exhaust it 
out of hospitality," thought I. 

*"What are you going to do.^" I asked: "not 
surely to light a fire this hot evening? I shall be 
smothered." 

'"Indeed, Monsieur, I feel it very chilly since 
the rain began; besides, I must boil the water for 
my tea, for I take tea on Sundays; you will be 
obliged to bear the heat.'" 

And Frances makes the tea, and sets the table, 
and brings out her pistolets, and offers them to 
Monsieur, and it is all very simple and idyllic. So is 
the scene where Crimsworth, without our knowing 



THE THREE BRONTES 119 

exactly how he does it, declares himself to Frances. 
The dialogue is half in French, and does not lend 
itself to quotation, but it compares very favourably 
with the more daring comedy of courtship in Jane 
Eyre. Frances is delicious in her very solidity, her 
absence of abandonment. She refuses flatly to give 
up her teaching at Crimsworth's desire, Crims- 
worth, who will have six thousand francs a year. 

*"How rich you are. Monsieur!" And then she 
stirred uneasily in my arms. *' Three thousand 
francs!'* she murmured, *' while I get only twelve 
hundred!'* She went on faster. "However, it must 
be so for the present; and Monsieur, were you not 
saying something about my giving up my place .'^ 
Oh no! I shall hold it fast'*; and her little fingers 
emphatically tightened on mine. 

*" Think of marrying you to be kept by you. 
Monsieur! I could not do it; and how dull my days 
would be! You would be away teaching in close, 
noisy schoolrooms, from morning till evening, and I 
should be lingering at home, unemployed and soli- 
tary. I should get depressed and sullen, and you 
would soon tire of me.'* 

*" Frances, you could yet read and study — two 
things you like so well.** 

**' Monsieur, I could not; I like a contemplative 
life, but I like an active better; I must act in some 
way, and act with you. I have taken notice. Mon- 
sieur, that people who are only in each other's 



120 THE THREE BRONTES 

company for amusement, never really like each 
other so well, or esteem each other so highly, as 
those who work together, and perhaps suffer 
together!'" 

To which Crimsworth replies, *You speak God's 
truth, and you shall have your own way, for it is 
the best way.' 

There is far more common-sense than passion in 
the solid little Frances and her apathetic lover. It 
is Frances Henri's situation, not her character, 
that recalls so irresistibly Lucy Snowe. Frances has 
neither Lucy's temperament, nor Lucy's terrible 
capacity for suffering. She suffers through her cir- 
cumstances, not through her temperament. The 
motives handled in The Professor belong to the 
outer rather than the inner world; the pressure of 
circumstance, bereavement, poverty, the influences 
of alien and unloved surroundings, these are the 
springs that determine the drama of Frances and 
of Crimsworth. Charlotte is displaying a deliber- 
ate interest in the outer world and the material 
event. She does not yet know that it is in the inner 
world that her great conquest and dominion is to 
be. The people in this first novel are of the same 
family as the people in Jane Eyre, in Shirley, in 
Villette. Crimsworth is almost reproduced in Louis 
Moore. Yorke Hunsden is the unmistakable father 
of Mr. Yorke and Rochester; Frances, a pale and 
passionless sister of Jane Eyre, and a first cousin 



THE THREE BRONTES 121 

of Lucy. Yet, in spite of these relationships, The 
Professor stands alone. In spite of its striking 
resemblance to Villette there is no real, no spiritual 
affinity. And the great gulf remains fixed between 
The Professor and Jane Eyre. 

This difference lies deeper than technique. It is 
a difference of vision, of sensation. The strange 
greyness of The Professor^ its stillness, is not due 
altogether to Charlotte's deliberate intention. It 
is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, 
of imperfect seeing. I know it has one fine piece of 
word-painting, but not one that can stand among 
Charlotte Bronte's masterpieces in this kind. 

Here it is. * Already the pavement was drying; 
a balmy and fresh breeze stirred the air, purified by 
lightning; I left the west behind me, where spread 
a sky like opal, azure inmingled with crimson; the 
enlarged sun, glorious in Tyrian dyes, dipped his 
brim already; stepping, as I was, eastward, I faced 
a vast bank of clouds, but also I had before me the 
arch of an even rainbow; a perfect rainbow — high, 
wide, vivid. I looked long; my eye drank in the 
scene, and I suppose my brain must have absorbed 
it; for that night, after lying awake in pleasant 
fever a long time, watching the silent sheet-light- 
ning, which still played among the retreating 
clouds, and flashed silvery over the stars, I at last 
fell asleep; and then in a dream was reproduced 
the setting sun, the bank of clouds, the mighty 



\ 



122 THE THREE BRONTES 

rainbow. I stood, methought, on a terrace; I leaned 
over a parapeted wall; there was space below me, 
depth I could not fathom, but hearing an endless 
splash of waves, I believed it to be the sea; sea 
spread to the horizon; sea of changeful green and 
intense blue; all was soft in the distance; all vapour- 
veiled. A spark of gold glistened on the line be- 
tween water and air, floated up, appeared, enlarged, 
changed; the object hung midway between heaven 
and earth, under the arch of the rainbow; the soft 
but dark clouds diffused behind. It hovered as on 
wings; pearly, fleecy, gleaming air streamed like 
raiment round it; light, tinted with carnation, 
coloured what seemed face and limbs; a large star 
shone with still lustre on an angel's forehead — ' 
But the angel ruins it. 

And this is all, and it leaves the dreariness more 
dreary. In The Professor you wander through a 
world where there is no sound, no colour, no vibra- 
tion; a world muffled and veiled in the stillness and 
the greyness of the hour before dawn. It is the 
work of a woman who is not perfectly alive. So far 
from having had her great awakening Charlotte is 
only half awake. Her intellect is alert enough and 
avid, faithful and subservient to the fact. It is her 
nerves and senses that are asleep. Her soul is 
absent from her senses. 

But in Jane Eyre, she is not only awakened, but 



THE THREE BRONTES 123 

awake as she has never been awake before, with all 
her virgin senses exquisitely alive, every nerve 
charged to intense vibration. Sometimes she is 
perniciously awake; she is doing appalHng things, 
things unjustifiable, preposterous; things that 
would have meant perdition to any other writer; 
she sees with wild, erroneous eyes; but the point is 
that she sees, that she keeps moving, that from the 
first page to the last, she is never once asleep. To 
come to Jane Eyre after The Professor is to pass 
into another world of feeling and of vision. 

It is not the difference between reality and un- 
reality. The Professor is real enough, more real in 
some minor points — dialogue, for instance — than 
Jane Eyre. The difference is that The Professor is 
a transcript of reality, a very delicate and faithful 
transcript, and Jane Eyre is reality itself, pressed 
on the senses. The pressure is so direct and so 
tremendous, that it lasts through those moments 
when the writer's grip has failed. 

For there are moments, long moments of per- 
fectly awful failure in Jane Eyre. There are phrases 
that make you writhe, such as *the etymology of 
the mansion's designation,' and the shocking per- 
sistency with which Charlotte Bronte * indites,' 
'peruses,' and 'retains.' There are whole scenes 
that outrage probability. Such are the scenes, or 
parts of scenes, between Jane and Rochester during 
the comedy of his courtship. The great orchard 



124 THE THREE BRONTES 

scene does not ring entirely true. For pages and 
pages it falters between passion and melodrama; 
between rhetoric and the cri de coeur. Jane in the 
very thick of her emotion can say, *I have talked, 
face to face, with what I reverence, with what I 
delight in — with an original, a vigorous, an ex- 
panded mind. I have known you, Mr. Rochester; 
and it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I 
absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see 
the necessity for departure; and it is like looking 
on the necessity of death.' And the comedy is 
worse. Jane elaborates too much in those delicious 
things she says to Rochester. Rochester himself 
provokes the parodist. (Such manners as Roches- 
ter's were unknown in mid- Victorian literature.) 

*He continued to send for me punctually the 
moment the clock struck seven; though when I 
appeared before him now, he had no such honeyed 
terms as '*love" and "darling" on his lips: the 
best words at my disposal were "provoking," 
"malicious elf," "sprite," "changeling," etc. For 
caresses, too, I now got grimaces; for a pressure of 
the hand, a pinch on the arm; for a kiss on the cheek, 
a severe tweak of the ear. It was all right : at pres- 
ent I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to 
anything more tender.' 

Yet there is comedy, pure comedy in those 
scenes, though never sustained, and never wrought 
to the inevitable dramatic climax. Jane is delight- 



THE THREE BRONTES 125 

ful when she asks Rochester whether the frown on 
his forehead will be his * married look/ and when 
she tells him to make a dressing-gown for himself 
out of the pearl -grey silk, ' and an infinite series of 
waistcoats out of the black satin.' The Quarterly 
was much too hard on the earlier cadeau scene, with 
Rochester and Jane and Adele, which is admirable 
in its suggestion of Jane's shyness and precision. 

*"N'est-ce pas. Monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau 
pour Mademoiselle Eyre, dans votre petit coflFre.'^" 

*"Who talks oicadeauxf said he gruffly; "did 
you expect a present, Miss Eyre.? Are you fond of 
presents .f^" and he searched my face with eyes that 
I saw were dark, irate, and piercing. 

'"I hardly know, sir; I have little experience of 
them; they are generally thought pleasant things." ' 

Charlotte Bronte was on her own ground there. 
But you tremble when she leaves it; you shudder 
throughout the awful drawing-room comedy of 
Blanche Ingram. Blanche says to her mother: *Am 
I right, Baroness Ingram of Ingram Park.?' And 
her mother says to Blanche, 'My lily-flower, you 
are right now, as always.' Blanche says to Roches- 
ter, 'Signor Eduardo, are you in voice to-night?' 
and he, 'Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will 
be.' And Blanche says to the footman, 'Cease that 
chatter, blockhead, and do my bidding.' 

That, Charlotte's worst lapse, is a very brief one, 
and the scene itself is unimportant. But what can 



136 THE THREE BRONTES 

be said of the crucial scene of the novel, the tre- 
mendous scene of passion and temptation? There 
is passion in the scene before it, between Jane and 
Rochester on the afternoon of the wedding-day 
that brought no wedding. 

'"Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If 
the man who had but one Httle ewe lamb that was 
dear to him as a daughter, that ate of his bread, 
and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by 
some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he 
would not have rued his bloody blunder more than 
I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me.'*" . . . 
"You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?" ere long he 
inquired wistfully, wondering, I suppose, at my 
continued silence and tameness; the result of weak- 
ness rather than of will. 

'"Yes, sir." 

'"Then tell me so roundly and sharply — don't 
spare me." 

*"I cannot; I am tired and sick. I want some 
water." 

'He heaved a sort of shuddering sigh, and taking 
me in his arms, carried me downstairs.' 

But there are terrible lapses. After Rochester's 
cry, '"Jane, my httle darling ... If you were 
mad, do you think I should hate you," ' he elabor- 
ates his idea and he is impossible: '"Your mind is 
my treasure, and if it were broken it would be my 
treasure still; if you raved, my arms should confine 






THE THREE BRONTES 127 

you and not a strait waistcoat — your grasp, even 
in fury, would have a charm for me; if you flew at 
me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I 
should receive you in an embrace, at least as fond 
as it would be restrictive."' 

And in the final scene of temptation there is a 
most curious mingling of reality and unreality, of 
the passion which is poetry, and the poetry which 
is not passion. 

Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, 
never was anything so frail, and so indomitable. 
A mere reed she feels in my hand!" And he shook 
me with the force of his hold. "I could bend her 
with my finger and thumb; and what good would 
it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her.^^ Con- 
sider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free 
thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than 
courage — with a stern triumph. Whatever I do 
with its cage, I cannot get at it — the savage, 
beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight 
prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. 
Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate 
would escape to heaven before I could call myself 
possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, 
spirit — with will and energy, and virtue and purity 
— that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of 
yourself, you could come with soft flight and nestle 
against my heart, if you would ; seized against your 
will you will elude the grasp like an essence — you 



128 THE THREE BRONTES 

will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh ! come, 
Jane, come!"' 

It is the crucial scene of the book; and with all 
its power, with all its vehemence and passionate 
reality it is unconvincing. It stirs you and it leaves 
you cold. 

The truth is that in Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte 
had not mastered the art of dialogue; and to the 
very last she was uncertain in her handling of it. 
In this she is inferior to all the great novelists of 
her time; inferior to some who were by no means 
great. She understood more of the spiritual speech 
of passion than any woman before her, but she 
ignores its actual expression, its violences, its 
reticences, its silences. In her great scenes she is 
inspired one moment, and the next positively 
handicapped by her passion and her poetry. In 
the same sentence she rises to the sudden poignant 
cri de coeur, and sinks to the artifice of metaphor. 
She knew that passion is poetry, and poetry is 
passion; you might say it was all she knew, or ever 
cared to know. But her language of passion is too 
often the language of written rather than of spoken 
poetry, of poetry that is not poetry at all. It is as 
if she had never heard the speech of living men and 
women. There is more actuality in the half-French 
chatter of Adele than in any of the high utterances 
of Jane and Rochester. 

And yet her sense of the emotion behind the utter- 



THE THREE BRONTES 129 

ance is infallible, so infallible that we accept the 
utterance. By some miracle, which is her secret, 
the passion gets through. The illusion of reality is 
so strong that it covers its own lapses. Jane Eyre 
exists to prove that truth is higher than actuality. 
'"Jane suits me: do I suit her.'^" 
*"To the finest fibre of my nature, sir."* 
If no woman alive had ever said that, it would 
yet be true to Jane's feeling. For it is a matter 
of the finest fibres, this passion of Jane's, that set 
people wondering about Currer Bell, that inflamed 
Mrs. Oliphant, as it inflamed the reviewer in The 
Quarterly, and made Charles Kingsley think that 
Currer Bell was coarse. Their state of mind is 
incredible to us now. For what did poor Jane do, 
after all.'^ Nobody could possibly have had more 
respect for the ten commandments. For all Roches- 
ter's raging, the ten commandments remain ex- 
actly where they were. It was inconceivable to 
Charlotte Bronte that any decent man or woman 
could make hay, or wish to make hay of them. 
And yet Jane offended. She sinned against the 
unwritten code that ordains that a woman may lie 
till she is purple in the face, but she must not, as a 
piece of gratuitous information, tell a man she loves 
him; not, that is to say, in as many words. She 
may declare her passion unmistakably in other 
ways. She may exhibit every ignominious and 
sickly sign of it; her eyes may glow like hot coals; 



130 



THE THREE BRONTES 



she may tremble; she may flush and turn pale; she 
may do almost anything, provided she does not 
speak the actual words. In mid- Victorian times an 
enormous licence was allowed her. She might faint, 
with perfect propriety, in public; she might be- 
come anaemic and send for the doctor, and be 
ordered iron; she might fall ill, horridly and visibly, 
and have to be taken away to spas and places 
to drink the waters. Everybody knew what that 
meant. If she had shrieked her passion on the 
house-tops she could hardly have published it more 
violently; but nobody minded. It was part of the 
mid-Victorian convention. 

Jane Eyre did none of these things. As soon as 
she was aware of her passion for Mr. Rochester she 
thrust it down into the pocket of her voluminous 
mid- Victorian skirt and sat on it. Instead of lan- 
guishing and fainting where Rochester could see 
her, she held her head rather higher than usual, 
and practised the spirited arts of retort and repartee. 
And nobody gave her any credit for it. Then 
Rochester puts the little thing (poor Jane was only 
eighteen when it happened) to the torture, and, 
with the last excruciating turn of the thumbscrew, 
she confesses. That was the enormity that was 
never forgiven her. 

'"You'll like Ireland, I think,'" says Rochester 
in his torturing mood; *"they are such kind- 
hearted people there." 



THE THREE BRONTES 131 

*"It is a long way off, sir." 

*"No matter, a girl of your sense will not object 
to the voyage or the distance." 

*"Not the voyage, but the distance: and then 
the sea is a barrier." 

'"From what, Jane. ?^" 

*"rrom England and from Thornfield, and — " 

*"WelI.?" 

*"rrom you, sir."' 

She had done it. She had said, or almost said the 
words. 

It just happened. There was magic in the orchard 
at Thornfield; there was youth in her blood; and 
— 'Jane, did you hear the nightingale singing in 
that wood.'^' 

Still, she had done it. 

And she was the first heroine who had. Adul- 
tery, with which we are fairly familiar, would have 
seemed a lesser sin. There may be extenuating 
circumstances for the adulteress. There were ex- 
tenuating circumstances for Rochester. He could 
plead a wife who went on all fours. There were no 
extenuating circumstances for little Jane. No use 
for her to say that she was upset by the singing of 
the nightingale; that it did n't matter what she 
said to Mr. Rochester when Mr. Rochester was 
going to marry Blanche Ingram anyway; that she 
only flung herself at his head because she knew she 
could n't hit it; that her plainness gave her a cer- 



132 THE THREE BRONTES 

tain licence, placing her beyond the code. Not a bit 
of it. Jane's plainness was one thing that they had 
against her. Until her time no heroine had been 
permitted to be plain. Jane's seizing of the position 
was part of the general insolence of her behaviour. 

Jane's insolence was indeed unparalleled. Hav- 
ing done the deed she felt no shame or sense of sin; 
she stood straight up and defended herself. That 
showed that she was hardened. 

It certainly showed — Jane's refusal to be abject 
— that Jane was far ahead of her age. 

*"I tell you I must go! " I retorted, roused to 
something like passion. *'Do you think I can stay 
to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an 
automaton .^^ — a machine without feelings.'^ andj 
can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from 
my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from { 
my cup.f^ Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, 
plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless .^^ You 
think wrong! I have as much soul as you, and full 
as much heart! And if God had gifted me with 
some beauty and much wealth, I should have made 
it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to 
leave you. I am not talking to you now through 
the medium of custom, conventionalities, or even 
of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses"* 
('Addresses.'^' oh Jane!) *"your spirit; just as if 
both had passed through the grave, and we stood 
at God's feet, equal — as we are!'" \ 






THE THREE BRONTES 133 

This, allowing for some slight difference in the 
phrasing, is twentieth century. And it was this — 
Jane's behaviour in the orchard, and not Roches- 
ter's behaviour in the past — that opened the door 
to the 'imps of evil meaning, polluting and defiling 
the domestic hearth.' 

Still, though The Quarterly censured Jane's be-' 
haviour, it was Rochester who caused most of the 
trouble and the scandal by his remarkable confes- 
sions. In a sense they were remarkable. Seldom, 
outside the pages of French fiction, had there been 
so lavish and public a display of mistresses. And 
while it was agreed on all hands that Rochester was 
incredible with his easy references to Celine and 
Giacinta and Clara, still more incredible was it 
that a young woman in a country parsonage should 
have realised so much as the existence of Clara and 
Giacinta and Celine. But, when Mrs. Gaskell and 
Madame Duclaux invoked Branwell and all his 
vices to account for Charlotte's experience, they 
forgot that Charlotte had read Balzac,^ and that 
Balzac is an experience in himself. She had also 
read Moore's Life of Byron, and really there is 
nothing in Rochester's confessions that Byron and 
a little Balzac would not account for. So that they 

* I am wrong. Charlotte did not read Balzac till later, when George 
Henry Lewes told her to. But there were those twenty 'clever, 
wicked, sophistical, and immoral French books' that she read in 
eighteen-forty. They may have served her purpose better. 



134 THE THREE BRONTES 

might just as well have left poor Branwell in his 
grave. 

Indeed, it was the manner of Rochester's con- 
fession that gave away the secret of Currer Bell's 
sex; her handling of it is so inadequate and per- 
functory. Rochester is at his worst and most im- 
probable in the telling of his tale. The tale in itself 
is one of Charlotte's clumsiest contrivances for 
conveying necessary information. The alternate 
baldness and exuberant, decorated, swaggering 
boldness (for Charlotte's style was never bolder 
than when she was essaying the impossible) alone 
betrayed the hand of an innocent woman. Curious 
that these makeshift passages with their obviously 
second-hand material, their palpably alien mise en 
scene should ever have suggested a personal exper- 
ience, and provoked The Quarterly to its infamous 
and immortal utterance: 'If we ascribe the book 
to a woman at all, we have no alternative but to 
ascribe it to one who has, for some suflBcient reason, 
long forfeited the society of her own sex.' 

The Quarterly, to do it justice, argued that Currer 
Bell was a man, for only a man would have betrayed 
such ignorance of feminine resources as to make 
Jane Eyre, on a night alarm, * hurry on a frock and 
shawl.' The reasoning passed. Nobody saw that 
such a man would be as innocent as any parson's 
daughter. Nobody pointed out that, as it happened, 
Currer Bell had provided her dowagers with 



THE THREE BRONTES 135 

*vast white wrappers' on the second night alarm. 
And, after all, the sex of The Quarterly reviewer 
itself remains a problem. Long ago, Mr. Andrew 
Lang detected the work of two hands in that famous 
article. You may say there were at least three. 
There was, first, the genial reviewer of Vanity Fair 
who revels in the wickedness of Becky Sharpe, and 
who is going to revel in the wickedness of Jane. 
Then suddenly some Mr. Brocklebank steps in, 
and you get a * black-marble clergyman' on Jane 
Eyre. 

*We have said,* says this person, *that this was 
the picture of a natural heart. This, to our view, is 
the great and crying mischief of the book. Jane 
Eyre is throughout the personification of an unre- 
generate and undisciplined spirit, the more danger- 
ous to exhibit from that prestige of principle and 
self-control, which is liable to dazzle the eyes too 
much for it to observe the insufficient and unsound 
foundation on which it rests. It is true Jane does 
right, and exerts great moral strength; but it is the 
strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law 
unto itself. . . . She has inherited the worst sin 
of our fallen nature — the sin of pride.' 

Jane, you see, should have sinned to show her 
Christian humility. The style, if not the reasoning, 
is pure Brocklebank. He does 'not hesitate to say 
that the tone of mind and thought, which has over- 
thrown authority and violated every code, human 



136 THE THREE BRONTES 

and divine, abroad, and fostered Chartism and 
rebellion at home, is the same which has written 
Jane Eyre J' 

Ellis and Acton (poor Acton!) Bell get it even 
stronger than that; and then, suddenly again, you 
come on a report on the 'Condition of Governesses,' 
palpably drawn up by a third person. For years 
Miss Rigby, who was afterwards Lady Eastlake, 
got the credit for the whole absurd performance, 
for she was known to have written the review on 
Vanity Fair. What happened seems to have been 
that Miss Rigby set out in all honesty to praise 
Jane Eyre. Then some infuriated person inter- 
fered and stopped her. The article was torn from 
the unfortunate Miss Rigby and given to Brockle- 
bank, who used bits of her here and there. Brockle- 
bank, in his zeal, overdid his part, so the report on 
Governesses was thrown in to give the whole thing 
an air of seriousness and respectability. So that it 
is exceedingly doubtful whether, after all, it was a 
woman's hand that dealt the blow. 

If Charlotte Bronte did not feel the effect of it to 
the end of her life, she certainly suffered severely 
at the time. It was responsible for that impassioned 
defence of Anne and Emily which she would have 
been wiser to have left alone. 

It must be admitted that Jane Eyre was an easy 
prey for the truculent reviewer, for its faults were 
all on the surface, and its great qualities lay deep. 



THE THREE BRONTES 137 

Deep as they were, they gripped the ordinary un- 
critical reader, and they gripped the critic in spite 
of himself, so that he bitterly resented being moved 
by a work so flagrantly and obviously faulty. What 
was more, the passion of the book was so intense 
that you were hardly aware of anything else, and 
its author's austere respect for the ten command- 
ments passed almost unobserved. 

But when her enemies accuse Charlotte Bronte 
of glorifying passion they praise her unaware. Her 
glory is that she did glorify it. Until she came 
passion between man and woman had meant 
animal passion. Fielding and Smollett had dealt 
with it solely on that footing. A woman's gentle, 
legalised affection for her husband was one thing, 
and passion was another. Thackeray and Dick- 
ens, on the whole, followed Fielding. To all three 
of them passion is an affair wholly of the senses, 
temporary, episodic, and therefore comparatively 
unimportant. Thackeray intimated that he could 
have done more with it but for his fear of Mrs. 
Grundy. Anyhow, passion was not a quality that 
could be given to a good woman; and so the good 
women of Dickens and Thackeray are conspicu- 
ously without it. And Jane Austen may be said tc 
have also taken Fielding's view. Therefore she was 
obliged to ignore passion. She gave it to one vulgar 
woman, Lydia Bennett, and to one bad one, Mrs. 
Rushworth; and having given it them, she turned 



138 THE THREE BRONTES 

her head away and refused to have anything more 
to do with these young women. She was not alone 
in her inability to * tackle passion.' No respectable 
mid- Victorian novelist could, when passion had so 
bad a name. 

And it was this thing, cast down, defiled, dragged 
in the mud, and ignored because of its defilement, 
that Charlotte Bronte took and lifted up. She 
washed it clean; she bathed it in the dew of the 
morning; she baptized it in tears; she clothed it in 
light and flame; she showed it for the divine, the 
beautiful, the utterly pure and radiant thing it is, 
'the very sublime of faith, truth and devotion.' 
She made it, this spirit of fire and air, incarnate in 
the body of a woman who had no sensual charm. 
Because of it little Jane became the parent of 
Caterina and of Maggie Tulliver; and Shirley pre- 
pared the way for Meredith's large-limbed, large- 
brained, large-hearted women. 

It was thus that Charlotte Bronte glorified pas- 
sion. The passion that she glorified being of the 
finest fibre, it was naturally not understood by 
people whose fibres were not fine at all. 

It was George Henry Lewes (not a person of the 
finest fibre) who said of Jane Eyre that 'the grand 
secret of its success ... as of all great and lasting 
successes was its reality.' In spite of crudities, 
absurdities, impossibilities, it remains most singu- 
larly and startlingly alive. In Jane Eyre Charlotte 



THE THREE BRONTES 139 

Bronte comes for the first time into her kingdom 
of the inner life. She grasps the secret, unseen 
springs; in her narrow range she is master of the 
psychology of passion and of suffering, whether she 
is describing the agony of the child Jane shut up 
in that terrible red room, or the anguish of the 
woman on the morning of that wedding-day that 
brought no wedding. Or take the scene of Jane's 
flight from Thornfield, or that other scene, unsur- 
passed in its passion and tenderness, of her return 
to Rochester at Ferndean. 

*To this house I came just ere dark, on an even- 
ing marked by the characteristics of sad sky, cold 
gale, and continued small, penetrating rain. . . . 
Even within a very short distance of the manor- 
house, you could see nothing of it; so thick and 
dark grew the timber of the gloomy wood about it. 
Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where 
to enter, and passing through them, I found my- 
self at once in the twilight of close-ranked trees. 
There was a grass-grown track descending the for- 
est aisle, between hoar and knotty shafts and under 
branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to 
reach the dwelling; but it stretched on and on, it 
wound far and farther: no sign of habitation or 
grounds was visible. ... At last my way opened, 
the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a rail- 
ing, then the house — scarce, by this dim light, 
distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green 



140 THE THREE BRONTES 

were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened 
only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed 
ground, from which the wood swept away in a 
semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; 
only a broad gravel-walk girdling a grass-plat, and 
this set in the heavy frame of the forest. The house 
presented two pointed gables in its front; the win- 
dows were latticed and narrow: the front-door was 
narrow too, one step led up to it. . . . It was still 
as a church on a week-day; the pattering rain on the 
forest leaves was the only sound audible. . . . 

* I heard a movement — that narrow front-door 
was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue 
from the grange. 

'It opened slowly; a figure came out into the twi- 
light and stood on the step; a man without a hat: 
he stretched forth his hand as if to feel whether 
it rained. Dark as it was I had recognised him.' . . . 

' His form was of the same strong and stalwart 
contour as ever. ... But in his countenance I 
saw a change: that looked desperate and brooding 
— that reminded me of some wronged and fettered 
wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his 
sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed 
eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look as looked 
that sightless Samson.* 

Again — Rochester hears Jane's voice in the 
room where she comes to him. 

*"And where is the speaker.'' Is it only a voice? 



THE THREE BRONTES 141 

Oh! I cannot see, but I must feel or my heart will 
stop and my brain burst." . . . 

*He groped. I arrested his wandering hand, and 
prisoned it in both mine. 

*"Her very fingers!" he cried; *'her small, slight 
fingers! If so, there must be more of her." 

*The muscular hand broke from my custody; my 
arm was seized, my shoulder — neck — wrist — I 
was entwined and gathered to him. . . . 

*I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now 
rayless eyes — I swept back his hair from his brow 
and kissed that too. He suddenly seemed to rouse 
himself: the conviction of the reality of all this 
seized him. 

'"It is you — is it, Jane.f* You are come back to 
me then.?" 
I am. 

The scene as it stands is far from perfect; but 
only Charlotte Bronte could sustain so strong an 
illusion of passion through so many lapses. And 
all that passion counts for no more than half in the 
astounding effect of reality she produces. Before 
Jane Eyre there is no novel written by a woman, 
with the one exception of Wuthering Heights, that 
conveys so poignant an impression of surround- 
ings, of things seen and heard, of the earth and sky; 
of weather; of the aspects of houses and of rooms. 
It suggests a positive exaltation of the senses of 
sound and light, an ecstasy, an enchantment before 



142 THE THREE BRONTES 

the visible, tangible world. It is not a matter of 
mere faithful observation (though few painters 
have possessed so incorruptibly the innocence of 
the eye). It is an almost supernatural intentness; 
sensation raised to the nth power. Take the descrip- 
tion of the awful red room at Gateshead. 

*A bed supported on massive pillars of mahog- 
any, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood 
out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large 
windows, with their blinds always drawn down, 
were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar 
drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot 
of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the 
walls were a soft fawn colour, with a flush of pink 
in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were 
of darkly-polished old mahogany. Out of these 
deep surrounding shades, rose high and glared 
white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the 
bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. 
Scarcely less prominent was an ample, cushioned 
easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, 
with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, 
like a pale throne. . . . Mr. Reed had been dead 
nine years: it was in this chamber he breathed his 
last; here he lay in state; hence his coflSn was borne 
by the undertaker's men ; and since that day a sense 
of dreary consecration had guarded it from fre- 
quent intrusion.* 

Could anything be more horrible than that red 



THE THREE BRONTES 143 

room? Or take the descriptions of the school at 
Lowood where the horror of pestilence hangs over 
house and garden. Through all these Gateshead 
and Lowood scenes Charlotte is unerring and abso- 
lute in her reality. 

Her very style, so uncertain in its rendering of 
human speech, becomes flawless in such passages 
as this: — 

*It was three o'clock; the church-bell tolled as I 
passed under the belfry: the charm of the hour lay 
in its approaching dimness, in the low-gliding and 
pale-beaming sun. I was a mile from Thornfield, 
in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts 
and blackberries in autumn, and even now possess- 
ing a few coral treasures in hips and haws, but whose 
best winter delight lay in its utter solitude and 
leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred, it made no 
sound here; for there was not a holly, not an ever- 
green to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and 
hazel bushes were as still as the white, worn stones 
which causewayed the middle of the path. Far and 
wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no 
cattle now browsed; and the little brown birds, 
which stirred occasionally in the hedge, looked like 
single russet leaves about to drop. 

*This lane inclined up-hill all the way to Hay. 
... I then turned eastward. 

*0n the hill-top above me sat the rising moon; 
pale yet as a cloud, but brightening momently; she 



144 THE THREE BRONTES 

looked over Hay which, half lost in trees, sent up 
a blue smoke from its few chimneys; it was yet a 
mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear 
plainly its thin murmurs of life. My ear too felt 
the flow of currents; in what dales and depths I 
could not tell: but there were many hills beyond 
Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their 
passes. That evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle 
of the nearest streams, the sough of the most 
remote. 

*A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and 
whisperings, at once so far away and so clear: a 
positive tramp, tramp; a metallic clatter, which 
effaced the soft wave-wanderings; as, in a picture, 
the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a 
great oak, drawn in dark and strong on the fore- 
ground, efface the aerial distance of azure hill, 
sunny horizon, and blended clouds, where tint 
melts into tint. 

*The din sounded on the causeway. . . .' 

Flawless this, too, of the sky after sunset: * Where 
the sun had gone down in simple state — pure 
of the pomp of clouds — spread a solemn purple, 
burning with the light of red jewel and furnace 
flame at one point, on one hill-peak, and extending 
high and wide, soft and still softer, over half 
heaven.' 

And this of her own moors: 'There are great 
moors behind and on each hand of me; there are 



THE THREE BRONTES 145 

waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley 
at my feet. The population here must be thin, and 
I see no passengers on these roads : they stretch out 
east, west, north and south — white, broad, lonely; 
they are all cut in the moor, and the heather grows 
deep and wild to their very verge.' 

She has given the secret of the moor country in 
a phrase: 'I felt the consecration of its loneliness.' v 
In that one line you have the real, the undying 
Charlotte Bronte. 

It is such immortal things that make the differ- 
ence between Jane Eyre and The Professor. So 
immeasurable is that difference that it almost justi- 
fies the theorist in assuming an * experience' to 
account for it, an experience falling between the 
dates of The Professor and Jane Eyre. Unfortun- 
ately there was none; none in the sense cherished 
by the researcher. Charlotte's letters are an un- 
broken record of those two years that followed her 
return from Brussels. Her life is laid bare in its 
long and cramped monotony, a life singularly 
empty of 'experience.' 

And yet an experience did come to her in that 
brief period. If the researcher had not followed a 
false scent across the Channel, if his flair for tragic 
passion had not destroyed in him all sense of pro- 
portion, he could not possibly have missed it; for 
it stared him in the face, simple, obvious, inevitable. 
But miss it he certainly did. Obsessed by his idea, 



146 THE THREE BRONTES 

he considered it a negligible circumstance that 
Charlotte should have read Wuthering Heights 
before she wrote Jane Eyre. And yet, I think that, 
if anything woke Charlotte up, it was that. Until 
then, however great her certainty of her own genius, 
she did not know how far she could trust it, how 
far it would be safe to let imagination go. Appalled 
by the spectacle of its excesses, she had divorced 
imagination from the real. But Emily knew none 
of these cold deliberations born of fear. Wuthering 
Heights was the fruit of a divine freedom, a divine 
unconsciousness. It is not possible that Charlotte, 
of all people, should have read Wuthering Heights 
without a shock of enlightenment; that she should 
not have compared it with her own bloodless work; 
that she should not have felt the wrong done to her 
genius by her self-repression. Emily had dared to 
be herself; she had not been afraid of her own 
passion; she had had no method; she had accom- 
plished a stupendous thing without knowing it, by 
simply letting herself go. And Charlotte, I think, 
said to herself, *That is what I ought to have done. 
That is what I will do next time.' And next time 
she did it. The experience may seem insufficient, 
but it is of such experiences that a great writer's 
life is largely made. And if you must have an in- 
fluence to account for Jane Eyre, there is no need 
to go abroad to look for it. There was influence 
enough in her own home. These three Brontes, 



THE THREE BRONTES 147 

adoring each other, were intolerant of any other 
influence; and the strongest spirit, which was 
Emily's, prevailed. To be sure, no remonstrances 
from Emily or Charlotte could stop Anne in her 
obstinate analysis of Walter Huntingdon; but it 
was some stray spark from Emily that kindled 
Anne. As for Charlotte, her genius must have 
quickened in her when her nerves thrilled to the 
shock of Wuthering Heights. This, I know, is only 
another theory; but it has at least the merit of its 
modesty. It is not offered as in the least account- 
ing for, or explaining, Charlotte's genius. It merely 
suggests with all possible humility a likely cause of 
its release. Anyhow it is a theory that does Char- 
lotte's genius no wrong, on which account it seems to 
me preferable to any other. It is really no argument 
against it to say that Charlotte never acknowledged 
her sister's influence, that she was indeed unaware 
of it; for, in the first place, the stronger the spirit- 
ual tie between them, the less likely was she to 
have been aware. In the second place, it is not 
claimed that Wuthering Heights was such an influ- 
ence as the * sojourn in Brussels' is said to have 
been — that it 'made Miss Bronte an author.' It 
is not claimed that if there had been no Wuthering 
Heights and no Emily Bronte, there would have 
been no Jane Eyre; for to me nothing can be more 
certain that whatever had, or had not happened, 
Charlotte's genius would have found its way. 



148 THE THREE BRONTES 

Charlotte's genius indeed was so profoundly akin 
to Charlotte's nature that its way, the way of its 
upward progress, was by violent impetus and recoil. 

In Shirley she revolts from the passion of Jane 
Eyre. She seems to have written it to prove that 
there are other things. She had been stung by The 
Quarterly's attack, stung by rumour, stung by 
every adverse thing that had been said. And yet 
not for a moment was she 'influenced' by her re- 
viewers. It was more in defiance than in submis- 
sion that she answered them with Shirley. Shirley 
was an answer to every criticism that had yet been 
made. In Shirley she forsook the one poor play of 
hearts insurgent for the vast and varied movement 
of the world; social upheavals, the clash of sects 
and castes, the first grim hand-to-hand struggle 
between capital and labour, all are there. The 
book opens with a drama, not of hearts but of 
artisans insurgent; frame-breakers, not breakers of 
the marriage law. In sheer defiance she essays to 
render the whole real world, the complex, many- 
threaded, many-coloured world; where the tragic 
warp is woven with the bright comedy of curates. 
It is the world of the beginnings; the world of the 
early nineteenth century that she paints. A world 
with the immensity, the profundity, the darkness 
of the brooding sea; where the spirit of a woman 
moves, troubling the waters; for Charlotte Bronte 



THE THREE BRONTES 149 

has before her the stupendous vision of the world 
as it was, as it yet is, and as it is to be. 

That world, as it existed from eighteen-twelve 
to Charlotte's own time, eighteen-fifty, was not a 
place for a woman with a brain and a soul. There 
was no career for any woman but marriage. If she 
missed it she missed her place in the world, her 
prestige, and her privileges as a woman. What 
was worse, she lost her individuality, and became 
a mere piece of furniture, of disused, old-fashioned 
furniture, in her father's or her brother's house. If 
she had a father or a brother there was no escape 
for her from dependence on the male; and if she 
had none, if there was no male about the house, 
her case was the more pitiable. And the traditions 
of her upbringing were such that the real, vital 
things, the things that mattered, were never men- 
tioned in her presence. Religion was the solitary 
exception; and religion had the reality and vitality 
taken out of it by its dissociation with the rest of 
life. A woman in these horrible conditions was only 
half alive. She had no energies, no passions, no 
enthusiasms. Convention drained her of her life- 
blood. What was left to her had no outlet; pent up 
in her, it bred weak, anaemic substitutes for its 
natural issue, sentimentalism for passion, and sensi- 
bility for the nerves of vision. This only applies, 
of course, to the average woman. 

Charlotte Bronte was born with a horror of the 



150 THE THREE BRONTES 

world that had produced this average woman, this 
creature of minute corruptions and hypocrisies. 
She sent out Jane Eyre to purify it with her passion. 
She sent out Shirley to destroy and rebuild it with 
her intellect. Little Jane was a fiery portent. Shir- 
ley was a prophecy. She is modern to her finger- 
tips, as modern as Meredith's great women : Diana, 
or Clara Middleton, or Carinthia Jane. She was 
born fifty years before her time. 

This is partly owing to her creator's prophetic 
insight, partly to her sheer truth to life. For Shirley 
was to a large extent a portrait of Emily Bronte 
who was born before her time. 

It is Emily Bronte's spirit that burns in Shirley 
Keeldar; and it is the spirit of Shirley Keeldar that 
gives life to the unwilling mass of this vast novel. 
It is almost enough immortality for Shirley that 
she is the only living and authentic portrait of 
Emily Bronte in her time. Charlotte has given her 
the * wings that wealth can give,' and they do not 
matter. She has also given her the wings of Emily's 
adventurous soul, the wealth of her inner life. 

'A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young 
veins ; unmingled — untroubled, not to be reached 
or ravished by human agency, because by no 
human agency bestowed: the pure gift of God to 
His creature, the free dower of Nature to her child. 
This joy gives her experience of a genii-life. Buoy- 
ant, by green steps, by glad hills, all verdure and 



THE THREE BRONTES 151 

light, she reaches a station scarcely lower than that 
whence angels looked down on the dreamer of 
Bethel, and her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, 
the vision of life as she wishes it.' 

'Her eye seeks, and her soul possesses, the vision 
of life as she wishes it — ' That was the secret of 
Emily's greatness, of her immeasurable superiority 
to her sad sisters. 

And again: *In Shirley's nature prevailed at 
times an easy indolence: there were periods when 
she took delight in perfect vacancy of hand and 
eye — moments when her thoughts, her simple 
existence, the fact of the world being around — 
and heaven above her, seemed to yield her such 
fulness of happiness, that she did not need to lift 
a finger to increase the joy. Often, after an active 
morning, she would spend a sunny afternoon in 
lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of 
friendly umbrage: no society did she need but that 
of Caroline, and it sufficed if she were within call; 
no spectacle did she ask but that of the deep blue 
sky, and such cloudlets as sailed afar and aloft 
across its span ; no sound but that of the bee's hum, 
the leaf's whisper.' 

There are phrases in Louis Moore's diary that 
bring Emily Bronte straight before us in her swift 
and vivid life. Shirley is * Sister of the spotted, 
bright, quick-fiery leopard.' 'Pantheress! — beau- 
tiful forest-born! — wily, tameless, peerless nature! 



V 



152 THE THREE BRONTES 

She gnaws her chain. I see the white teeth work- 
ing at the steel! She has dreams of her wild 
woods, and pinings after virgin freedom.' *How 
evanescent, fugitive, fitful she looked — slim and 
swift as a Northern streamer!' * . . . With her 
long hair flowing full and wavy; with her noiseless 
step, her pale cheek, her eye full of night and light- 
ning, she looked, I thought, spirit-like — a thing 
made of an element — the child of a breeze and 
a flame — the daughter of ray and raindrop — a 
thing never to be overtaken, arrested, fixed.' 

Like Emily she is not * caught.' 'But if I were,' 
she says, *do you know what soothsayers I would 
consult.'^ . . . The little Irish beggar that comes 
barefoot to my door; the mouse that steals out of 
the cranny in the wainscot; the bird that in frost 
and snow pecks at my window for a crumb; the 
dog that licks my hand and sits beside my knee.' 

And yet again: *She takes her sewing occasion- 
ally: but, by some fatality, she is doomed never to 
sit steadily at it for above five minutes at a time: 
her thimble is scarcely fitted on, her needle scarce 
threaded, when a sudden thought calls her up- 
stairs: perhaps she goes to seek some just-then- 
remembered old ivory-backed needle-book, or older 
china-topped work-box, quite unneeded, but which 
seems at the moment indispensable; perhaps to ar- 
range her hair, or a drawer which she recollects 
to have seen that morning in a state of curious 



THE THREE BRONTES 153 

confusion; perhaps only to take a peep from a par- 
ticular window at a particular view where Briar- 
field Church and Rectory are visible, pleasantly 
bowered in trees. She has scarcely returned, and 
again taken up the slip of cambric, or square of 
half-wrought canvas, when Tartar's bold scrape 
and strangled whistle are heard at the porch-door, 
and she must run to open it for him; it is a hot day; 
he comes in panting; she must convoy him to the 
kitchen, and see with her own eyes that his water- 
bowl is replenished. Through the open kitchen- 
door the court is visible, all sunny and gay, and 
peopled with turkeys and their poults, peahens 
and their chicks, pearl-flecked Guinea fowls, and a 
bright variety of pure white, and purple-necked, 
and blue and cinnamon-plumed pigeons. Irresist- 
ible spectacle to Shirley ! She runs to the pantry for 
a roll, and she stands on the doorstep scattering 
crumbs: around her throng her eager, plump, 
happy, feathered vassals. . . . There are perhaps 
some little calves, some little new-yeaned lambs — 
it may be twins, whose mothers have rejected them : 
Miss Keeldar . . . must permit herself the treat 
of feeding them with her own hand.' 

Like Emily she is impatient of rituals and creeds. 
Like Emily she adores the Earth. Not one of Char- 
lotte's women except Shirley could have chanted 
that great prose hymn of adoration in which Earth 
worships and is worshipped. '"Nature is now at 



154 THE THREE BRONTES 

her evening prayers; she is kneeling before those 
red hills. I see her prostrate on the great steps of 
her altar, praying for a fair night for mariners at 
sea, for travellers in deserts, for lambs on moors, 
and unfledged birds in woods. ... I see her, and 
I will tell you what she is like: she is like what Eve 
was when she and Adam stood alone on earth." ' 
"'And that is not Milton's Eve, Shirley,'" says 
Caroline, and Shirley answers: * "No, by the pure 
Mother of God, she is not." ' Shirley is half a Pagan. 
She would beg to remind Milton **'that the first 
men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was 
their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, 
Oceanus; she bore Prometheus. ... I say, there 
were giants on the earth in those days, giants that 
strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast 
that heaved with life on this world yielded dar- 
ing which could contend with Omnipotence; the 
strength which could bear a thousand years of 
bondage — the vitality which could feed that vul- 
ture death through uncounted ages — the unex- 
hausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to 
immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, 
struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring 
forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven- 
born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well- 
spring of the blood of nations; and grand the unde- 
generate head where rested the consort-crown of 
creation. . . ."' 



THE THREE BRONTES 155 



* "You have not yet told me what you saw kneel- 
ing on those hills." 

*"I saw — I now see — a woman-Titan; her 
robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the 
heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil, white 
as an avalanche, sweeps from her head to her feet, 
and arabesques of lightning flame on its borders. 
Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that 
horizon : through its blush shines the star of evening. 
Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear — 
they are deep as lakes — they are lifted and full 
of worship — they tremble with the softness of love 
and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the 
expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early 
moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines 
her bosom on the edge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty 
hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to 
face, she speaks with God.'" 

It is the living sister speaking for the dead; for 
Charlotte herself had little of Emily's fine Pagan- 
ism. But for one moment, in this lyric passage, her 
soul echoes the very soul of Emily as she gathers 
round her all the powers and splendours (and some, 
alas! of the fatal rhetoric) of her prose to do her 
honour. 

It is not only in the large figure of the Titan 
Shirley that Charlotte Bronte shows her strength. 
She has learnt to draw her minor masculine char- 
acters with more of insight and of accuracy — 



156 THE THREE BRONTES 

Caroline Helstone, the Yorkes, Robert Moore, Mr. 
Helstone, Joe Scott, and Barraclough, the * joined 
Methody.' With a few strokes they stand out 
living. She has acquired more of the art of dia- 
logue. She is a past master of dialect, of the racy, 
native speech of these men. Not only is Mr. Yorke 
painted with unerring power and faithfulness in 
every detail of his harsh and vigorous personality, 
but there is no single lapse from nature when he is 
speaking. The curates only excepted, Charlotte 
never swerves from this fidelity. But when she is 
handling her curates, it is a savage, and utterly 
inartistic humour that inspires her. You feel that 
she is not exercising the art of comedy, but relieving 
her own intolerable boredom and irritation. No 
object could well be more innocent, and more 
appealing in its innocence, than little Mr. Sweet- 
ing, curate of Nunnerly. Mr. Sweeting at the tea- 
table, * having a dish of tarts before him, and mar- 
malade and crumpet upon his plate,' should have 
moved the Comic Spirit to tears of gentleness. 

Curates apart, two-thirds of Shirley are written 
with an unerring devotion to the real, to the very 
actual. They have not, for all that, the profound 
reality of Jane Eyre. The events are confused, 
somehow; the atmosphere is confusing; the north- 
ern background is drawn with a certain hardness 
and apathy of touch; the large outlines are ob- 
scured, delicate colours sharpened; it is hard and 



[Facsimile of a Charlotte Bronte letter in the possession of Rari-y 
E. Widener, Esq., Philadelphia, and reproduced by his permission.] 





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THE THREE BRONTES 157 

yet blurred, like a bad steel engraving. Charlotte's 
senses, so intensely, so supernaturally alive in Jane 
Eyre, are only passably awake in Shirley. It has 
some of the dulness of The Professor^ as it has more 
than its sober rightness. But, for three and twenty 
chapters, the sobriety, the rightness triumph. 
There are no improbabilities, no flights of imagina- 
tion, none of the fine language which was the shame 
when it was not the glory of Jane Eyre. 

Then suddenly there comes a break — a cleav- 
age. It comes with that Chapter Twenty-four, 
which is headed *The Valley of the Shadow of 
Death.' It was written in the first months after 
Emily Bronte's death. 

From that point Charlotte's level strength de- 
serts her. Ever after, she falls and soars, and soars 
and falls again. There is a return to the manner of 
Jane Eyre, the manner of Charlotte when she is 
deeply moved; there is at times a relapse to Jane 
Eyre's worst manner. You get it at once in 'The 
Valley of the Shadow' chapter, in the scene of Car- 
oline's love-sick delirium. 

*"But he will not know I am ill till I am gone; 
and he will come when they have laid me out, and 
I am senseless, cold and stiff. 

'"What can my departed soul feel then.'^ Can it 
see or know what happens to the clay.^* Can spirits, 
through any medium, communicate with living 
flesh .^ Can the dead at all revisit those they leave .^^ 



158 THE THREE BRONTES 

Can they come in the elements? Will wind, water, 
fire lend me a path to Moore? 

*"Is it for nothing the wind sounds almost 
articulate sometimes — sings as I have lately 
heard it sing at night — or passes the casement 
sobbing, as if for sorrow to come? Does nothing 
then haunt it — nothing inspire it?"* 

The awful improbability of Caroline is more 
striking because of its contrast with the inspired 
Tightness of the scene of Cathy's delirium in Wuih- 
ering Heights. It is Charlotte feebly echoing Emily, 
and going more and more wrong up to her perora- 
tion. 

Delirious Caroline wonders: *"What is that elec- 
tricity they speak of, whose changes make us well or 
ill; whose lack or excess blasts; whose even balance 
revives? ..." 

* *' Where is the other world? In what will another 
life consist? Why do I ask? Have I not cause to 
think that the hour is hasting but too fast when the 
veil must be rent for me? Do I not know the 
Grand Mystery is likely to break prematurely on 
me? Great Spirit! in whose goodness I confide; 
whom, as my Father, I have petitioned night and 
morning from early infancy, help the weak crea- 
tion of Thy hands ! Sustain me through the ordeal 
I dread and must undergo! Give me strength! 
Give me patience ! Give me — oh ! give me Faith ! " ' 

Jane Eyre has done worse than that, so has 



THE THREE BRONTES 159 

Rochester; but somehow, when they were doing 
their worst with it, they got their passion through. 
There is no hve passion behind this speech of Car- 
ohne's, with its wild stress of itahcs and of capi- 
tals. What passion there was in Charlotte when she 
conceived Carohne was killed by Emily's death. 

And Mrs. Pryor, revealing herself to Caroline, 
is evep more terrible. She has all the worst vices 
of Charlotte's dramatic style. IMrs. Pryor calls to 
the spirit of Caroline's dead father: '*' James, slum- 
ber peacefully ! See ! your terrible debt is cancelled! 
Look! I wipe out the long, black account with 
my own hand ! James, your child atones : this liv- 
ing likeness of you — this thing with your perfect 
features — this one good gift you gave me has 
nestled affectionately to my heart and tenderly 
called me *mother.' Husband! rest forgiven!"* 

Even Robert Moore, otherwise almost a master- 
piece, becomes improbable when, in his great scene, 
Shirley refuses him. When Mr. Yorke asks him 
what has gone wrong he replies: 'The machinery 
of all my nature; the whole enginery of this human 
mill; the boiler, which I take to be the heart, is fit 
to burst.' 

Shirlej^ herself is impossible with her * Lucifer, Star 
of the Morning, thou art fallen,' and her speech to 
her mercenary uncle: *Sir, your god, your great Bel, 
your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon.* 

What is worse than all, Louis Moore — Louis, 



160 THE THREE BRONTES 

the hero, Louis, the master of passion, is a failure. 
He is Charlotte Bronte's most terrible, most glar- 
ing failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not 
draw men, or that she drew them all alike; Robert 
Moore, the hard-headed man of business, the man 
of will and purpose, who never gives in and never 
gives up, is not only almost a masterpiece but a 
spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first examples 
of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, 
no virility in his swarthy body. He is the most 
unspeakable of schoolmasters. Yet Charlotte lav- 
ished on this puppet half the wealth of her imagina- 
tion. She flings phrase after perfect phrase to him 
to cover himself with — some of her best things 
have been given to Louis Moore; but they do not 
make him live. Again, she strangles him in his own 
rhetoric. The courtship of Louis Moore and Shirley 
will not compare with that of Jane and Rochester. 
There is no nightingale singing in their wood. 

Yet, for all that, Shirley comes very near to being 
Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. It is inspired from 
first to last with a great intention and a great idea. 
It shows a vision of reality wider than her grasp. Its 
faults, like the faults of Jane Eyre, are all on the sur- 
face, only there is more surface in Shirley. If it has 
not Jane Eyre's commanding passion, it has a vaster 
sweep. It was literally the first attempt in literature 
to give to woman her right place in the world. 
: From first to last there is not a page or a line in 



THE THREE BRONTES 161 

it that justifies the malignant criticism of Mrs. 
Ohphant. CaroHne Helstone does not justify it. 
She is no window-gazing virgin on the look-out, in 
love already before the man has come. She is a 
young girl, very naturally in love with a man whom 
she has known for years, who is always on the spot. 
As for Shirley, she flung herself with all the vehe- 
mence of her prophetic soul on the hypocritical 
convention that would make every woman depend- 
ent on some man, and at the same time despises her 
for the possession of her natural instincts. And 
Caroline followed her. *I observe that to such 
grievances as society cannot cure, it usually forbids 
utterance, on pain of its scorn : this scorn being only 
a sort of tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. 
People hate to be reminded of ills they are unable 
or unwilling to remedy; such reminder, in forcing 
on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more 
painful sense of an obligation to make some un- 
pleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their 
self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless 
and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place 
and an occupation in the world: the demand dis- 
turbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents. . . . 
Men of England ! Look at your poor girls, many of 
them fading round you, dropping off in consump- 
tion or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating to 
sour old maids, — envious, back-biting, wretched, 
because life is a desert to them; or, what is worst 



162 THE THREE BRONTES 

of all, reduced to strive, by scarce modest coquetry 
and debasing artifice, to gain that position and con- 
sideration by marriage, which to ceHbacy is denied. 
Fathers! cannot you alter these things? . . . You 
would wish to be proud of your daughters, and not 
to blush for them, then seek for them an interest 
and an occupation which shall raise them above 
the flirt, the manoeuverer, the mischief-making tale- 
bearer. Keep your girls' minds narrow and de- 
graded — they will still be a plague and a care, 
sometimes a disgrace to you: give them scope and 
work — they will be your gayest companions in 
health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your 
most faithful prop in old age.* 

That is the argument from fathers, and it comes 
from Caroline Helstone, not from Shirley. And the 
fact that Caroline married Robert Moore, and 
Shirley fell in love when her hour came (and with 
Louis Moore, too!) does not diminish the force or 
the sincerity or the truth of the tirade. 

Shirley may not be a great novel; but it is a great 
prophetic book. Shirley's vision of the woman 
kneeling on the hills serves for more than Emily 
Bronte's vision of Hertha and Demeter, of Eve, the 
Earth-mother, *the mighty and mystical parent'; 
it is Charlotte Bronte's vindication of Eve, her 
vision of woman as she is to be. She faced the world 
once for all with her vision: 'I see her,' she said, 
'and I will tell you what she is like.' 



THE THREE BRONTES 163 

Mrs. Oliphant did not see the woman kneeling 
on the hills. Neither George Eliot nor Mrs. Gaskell 
saw her. They could not possibly have told the 
world what she was like. It is part of Charlotte 
Bronte's superior greatness that she saw. 

You do not see that woman in Villette. She has 
passed with the splendour of Charlotte's vision of 
the world. The world in Villette is narrowed to 
a Pensionnat de Demoiselles, and centred in the 
heart of one woman. And never, not even in Jane 
Eyre, and certainly not in Shirley, did Charlotte 
Bronte achieve such mastery of reality, and with it 
such mastery of herself. Villette is the final triumph 
of her genius over the elements that warred in her. 
It shows the movement of her genius, which was 
always by impulse and recoil. In The Professor she 
abjured, in the interests of reality, the * imagina- 
tion' of her youth. In Jane Eyre she was urged for- 
ward by the released impetus of the forces she re- 
pressed. In Shirley they are still struggling with 
her sense of the sober and the sane reality; the book 
is torn to fragments in the struggle, and in the end 
imagination riots. 

But in Villette there are none of these battlings 
and rendings, these Titanic upheavals and subsid- 
ences. Charlotte Bronte's imagination, and her 
sense of the real, are in process of fusion. There 
are few novels in which an imagination so supreme 



164 THE THREE BRONTES 

is wedded to so vivid a vision of actuality. It may 
be said that Charlotte Bronte never achieved posi- 
tive actuality before. The Pensionnat de Demoi- 
selles is almost as visibly and palpably actual as 
the Maison Vauquer in Pere Goriot. It is a return 
to the method of experience with a vengeance. 
Charlotte's success, indeed, was so stunning that 
for all but sixty years Villette has passed for a 
roman a clef, the novel, not only of experience, but 
of personal experience. There was a certain plausi- 
bility in that view. The characters could all be 
easily recognised. And when Dr. John was identi- 
fied with Mr. George Smith, and his mother with 
Mr. George Smith's mother, and Madame Beck 
with Madame Heger, and M. Paul Emanuel with 
Madame Heger's husband, the inference was irre- 
sistible: Lucy Snowe was, and could only be, 
Charlotte Bronte. And as the figure of M. Paul 
Emanuel was ten times more vivid and convincing 
than that of Rochester, so all that applied to Jane 
Eyre applied with ten times more force to Lucy. 
In Villette Charlotte Bronte was considered to have 
given herself hopelessly away. 

I have tried to show that this view cannot stand 
before an unprejudiced examination of her life and 
letters. No need to go into all that again. On the 
evidence, Charlotte seems at the best of times to 
have fallen in love with diflSculty; and she most 
certainly was no more in love with 'the little man,' 



THE THREE BRONTES 165 

Paul Emanuel, than she was with 'the little man,' 
Mr. Taylor. The really important and interesting 
point is that, if she had been, if he had thus obtained 
the reality with which passion endows its object, 
her imagination would have had no use for him; its 
work would have been done for it. 

To the supreme artist the order of the actual 
event is one thing, and the order of creation is an- 
other. Their lines may start from the same point 
in the actual, they may touch again and again, but 
they are not the same, and they cannot run exactly 
parallel. There must always be this difference be- 
tween the actual thing and the thing drawn from 
it, however closely, that each is embedded and 
emmeshed in a different context. For a character 
in a novel to be alive it must have grown; and to 
have grown it must have followed its own line of 
evolution, inevitably and in its own medium; and 
that, whether or not it has been * taken,' as they 
say, 'from life.' The more alive it is the less likely 
is it to have been 'taken,' to have been seized, 
hauled by the scruff of its neck out of the dense web 
of the actual. All that the supreme artist wants is 
what Charlotte Bronte called 'the germ of the real,' 
by which she meant the germ of the actual. He 
does not want the alien, developed thing, standing 
in its own medium ready made. Charlotte Bronte 
said that the character of Dr. John was a failure 
because it lacked the germ of the real. She should 



166 THE THREE BRONTES 

have said that it lacked the germ of many reals; 
it is so obviously drawn from incomplete observa- 
tion of a single instance. I am inclined to think 
that she did 'take' Dr. John. And whenever Char- 
lotte Bronte *took' a character, as she took the 
unfortunate curates and Mr. St. John Rivers, the 
result was failure. 

No supreme work of art was ever 'taken.' It 
was begotten and born and grown, the offspring of 
faithful love between the soul of the artist and real- 
ity. The artist must bring to his 'experience' as 
much as he takes from it. The dignity of Nature 
is all against these violences and robberies of art. 
She hides her deepest secret from the marauder, 
and yields it to the lover who brings to her the fire 
of his own soul. 

And that fire of her own soul was what Charlotte 
Bronte brought to her supreme creations. It was 
certainly what she brought to Paul Emanuel. Im- 
possible to believe that M. Heger gave her more 
than one or two of the germs of M. Paul. Person- 
ally, I can only see the respectable M. Heger as a 
man whose very essence was a certain impassivity 
and phlegm under the appearance of a tempera- 
ment. Choleric he was, with the superficial and 
temporary choler of the schoolmaster. A school- 
master gifted with the most extraordinary, the 
most marvellous, the most arresting faculty for 
making faces, a faculty which in an Englishman 



THE THREE BRONTES 167 

would have argued him a perfect volcano of erratic 
temperament. But I more than suspect that when 
it came to temperament M. Heger took it out in 
faces; that he was nothing more than a benevolent, 
sentimental, passably intellectual bourgeois; but 
bourgeois to the core. Whereas, look at M. Paul! 
No wonder that with that tame and solid stuff 
before her it took even Charlotte Bronte's fiery 
spirit nine years (torturing the unwilling dross that 
checked its flight) before it could create Paul 
Emanuel. Because of her long work on him he is at 
once the most real and the best imagined of her 
characters. 

, I admit that in the drawing of many of her minor 
characters she seems to have relied upon very close 
and intimate observation of the living model. But 
in none of her minor characters is she at grips 
with the reality that, for her, passion is. Charlotte 
refused to give heroic rank to persons she had 
merely observed; she would not exalt them to the 
dignity of passion. Her imagination could not work 
on them to that extent. (That is partly why Car- 
loine's delirium is so palpably * faked.') Even in her 
portrait of the heroic Shirley, who was frankly 
'taken' from her sister Emily, she achieved the 
likeness mainly by the artifice of unlikeness, hy 
removing Shirley Keeldar into a life in which Emily 
Bronte had never played a part, whereby Shirley 
became for her a separate person. (You cannot by 



168 THE THREE BRONTES 

any stretch of the imagination see Emily falling in 
love with the schoolmaster, Louis Moore.) 

Lest there should be any doubt on the subject, 
Charlotte herself explained to Mrs. Gaskell how her 
imagination worked. 'I asked her,' Mrs. Gaskell 
says, 'whether she had ever taken opium, as the 
description given of its effects in Villette was so 
exactly like what I had experienced — vivid and 
exaggerated presence of objects, of which the out- 
lines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. 
She replied that she had never, to her knowledge, 
taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had 
followed the process she always adopted when she 
had to describe anything that had not fallen within 
her own experience; she had thought intently on it 
for many and many a night before falling asleep — 
wondering what it was like, or how it would be — 
till at length, sometimes after her story had been ar- 
rested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up 
in the morning with all clear before her, as if she 
had in reality gone through the experience, and then 
could describe it, word for word, as it happened.' 

To a mind like that the germ of the actual was 
enough. Charlotte Bronte's genius, in fact, was 
ardently impatient of the actual; it cared only for 
its own. At the least hint from experience it was 
off. A glance, a gesture of M. Heger's was enough 
to fire it to the conception of Paul Emanuel. He 
had only to say a kind word to her, to leave a book 



THE THREE BRONTES 169 

or a box of bon-bons in her desk (if he did leave 
bon-bons) for Charlotte's fire to work on him. She 
had only to say to herself 'This Httle man is ador- 
able in friendship; I wonder what he would be like 
in love,' and she saw that he would be something, 
though not altogether, like Paul Emanuel. She 
had only to feel a pang of half-remorseful, half- 
humorous affection for him, and she knew what 
Lucy felt like in her love-sick agony. As for Ma- 
dame Heger, Madame's purely episodic jealousy, 
her habits of surveillance, her small inscrutabilities 
of behaviour, became the fury, the treachery, the 
perfidy of Madame Beck. For treachery and per- 
fidy, and agony and passion, were what Charlotte 
wanted for Villette. 

And yet it is true that Villette is a novel of exper- 
ience, owing its conspicuous qualities very much to 
observation. After all, a contemporary novel can- 
not be made altogether out of the fire of the great 
writer's soul. It is because Charlotte Bronte relied 
too much on the fire of her own soul that in Jane 
Eyre and parts of Shirley she missed that unique 
expression of actuality which, over and over again, 
she accomplished in Villette, For the expression oi 
a social milieu, for manners, for the dialogue o: 
ordinary use, for the whole detail of the speech 
characteristic of an individual and a type, for the 
right accent and pitch, for all the vanishing shades 
and aspects of the temporary and the particular, 



170 THE THREE BRONTES 

the greatest and the fieriest writer is at the mercy of 
observation and experience. It was her final mas- 
tery of these things that made it possible to praise 
Charlotte Bronte's powers of observation at the 
expense of her genius; and this mainly because of 
M. Paul. 

No offspring of genius was ever more alive, more 
rich in individuality, than M. Paul. He is alive 
and he is adorable, in his paletot and bonnet grec, 
from the moment when he drags Lucy up three 
pairs of stairs to the solitary and lofty attic and 
locks her in, to that other moment when he brings 
her to the little house that he has prepared for her. 
Whenever he appears there is pure radiant comedy, 
and pathos as pure. It is in this utter purity, this 
transparent simplicity, that Villette is great. There 
is not one jarring note in any of the delicious dia- 
logues between Lucy and M. Paul, not one of those 
passages which must be erased if quotation is not 
to fail of its effect. Take the scene where Lucy 
breaks M. Paul's spectacles. 

'A score of times ere now I had seen them fall 
and receive no damage — this time, as Lucy 
Snowe's hapless luck would have it, they so fell 
that each clear pebble became a shivered and shape- 
less star. 

*Now, indeed, dismay seized me — dismay and 
regret. I knew the value of these lunettes: M. Paul's 
sight was peculiar, not easily fitted, and these 



THE THREE BRONTES 171 

glasses suited him. I had heard him call them his 
treasures : as I picked them up, cracked and worth- 
less, my hand trembled. Frightened through all 
my nerves I was to see the mischief I had done, but 
I think I was even more sorry than afraid. For 
some seconds I dared not look the bereaved Pro- 
fessor in the face; he was the first to speak. 

*"La!" he said: "me voila veuf de mes lunettes! 
I think that Mademoiselle Lucy will now confess 
that the cord and gallows are amply earned; she 
trembles in anticipation of her doom. Ah, traitress ! 
traitress! You are resolved to have me quite blind 
and helpless in your hands!" 

*I lifted my eyes: his face, instead of being irate, 
lowering and furrowed, was overflowing with the 
smile, coloured with the bloom I had seen brighten- 
ing it that evening at the Hotel Crecy. He was not 
angry — not even grieved. For the real injury he 
showed himself full of clemency; under the real 
provocation, patient as a saint.' 

Take the 'Watchguard' scene. 

*M. Paul came and stood behind me. He asked 
at what I was working; and I said I was making a 
watchguard. He asked "For whom.''" And I an- 
swered, "For a gentleman — one of my friends."' 

Whereupon M. Paul flies into a passion, and ac- 
cuses Lucy of behaving to him *"With what pun- 
gent vivacities — what an impetus of mutiny — 
what a fougue of injustice." . . . "Chut! a Tin- 



172 THE THREE BRONTES 

slant ! There ! there I went — vive comme la 
poudre." He was sorry — he was very sorry: for 
my sake he grieved over the hopeless peculiarity. 
This emportementy this chaleur — generous, per- 
haps, but excessive — would yet, he feared, do 
me a mischief. It was a pity. I was not — he be- 
lieved, in his soul — wholly without good qualities; 
and would I but hear reason, and be more sedate, 
more sober, less en Vair, less coquette, less taken by 
show, less prone to set an undue value on outside 
excellence — to make much of the attentions of 
people remarkable chiefly for so many feet of stat- 
ure, des couleurs de poupee, un nez plus on moins 
Men fait, and an enormous amount of fatuity — I 
might yet prove an useful, perhaps an exemplary 
character. But, as it was — And here the little 
man's voice was for a moment choked. 

*I would have looked up at him, or held out my 
hand, or said a soothing word; but I was afraid, if 
I stirred, I should either laugh or cry; so odd, in 
all this, was the mixture of the touching and the 
absurd. 

*I thought he had nearly done: but no, he sat 
down that he might go on at his ease. 

' "While he, M. Paul, was on these painful topics, 
he would dare my anger, for the sake of my good, 
and would venture to refer to a change he had 
noticed in my dress.' 



jj » 



THE THREE BRONTES 173 



<(( 



"And if you condemn a bow of ribbon for a lady, 
monsieur, you would necessarily disapprove of a 
thing like this for a gentleman?" holding up my 
bright little chainlet of silk and gold. His sole reply 
was a groan — I suppose over my levity. 

* After sitting some minutes in silence, and 
watching the progress of the chain, at which I now 
wrought more assiduously than ever, he inquired: 

' "Whether what he had just said would have the 
effect of making me entirely detest him.'^" 

' I hardly remember what answer I made, or how 
it came about; I don't think I spoke at all, but I 
know we managed to bid good-night on friendly 
terms: and even after M. Paul had reached the 
door, he turned back just to explain *'that he would 
not be understood to speak in entire condemnation 
of the scarlet dress. ..." 

'"And the flowers under my bonnet, monsieur.'^" 
I asked. "They are very little ones." 

*"Keep them little, then," said he. "Permit 
them not to become full-blown." 

'"And the bow, monsieur — the bit of rib- 
bon.?" 

*"Va pour le ruban!" was the propitious an- 
swer. 

*And so we settled it.' 

That is good ; and when Lucy presents the watch- 
guard it is better still. 

*He looked at the box: I saw its clear and warm 



174 THE THREE BRONTES 

tint, and bright azure circlet, pleased his eyes. I 
told him to open it. 

"'My initials!" said he, indicating the letters in 
the lid. "Who told you I was called Carl David.?*" 

*"A little bird, monsieur." 

*"Does it fly from me to you.^ Then one can tie 
a message under its wing when needful." 

' He took out the chain — a trifle indeed as to 
value, but glossy with silk and sparkling with beads. 
He liked that, too — admired it artlessly, like a 
child. 

"'Forme.?'* 

"'Yes, for you." 

'"This is the thing you were working at last 
night.?" 

"'The same." 

"'You finished it this morning.?" 

'"I did." 

'"You commenced it with the intention that it 
should be mine.^" 

'"Undoubtedly." 

"'And offered on my fete-day.?" 

'"Yes." 

'"This purpose continued as you wove it.?" 

'Again I assented. 

'"Then it is not necessary that I should cut out 
any portion — saying, this part is not mine : it was 
plaited under the idea and for the adornment of 
another.?" 



THE THREE BROXTES 175 

***By no means. It is neither necessary, nor 
would it be just." 

*"This object is a// mine.?" 

*"That object is yours entirely." 

* Straightway monsieur opened his paletot, ar- 
ranged the guard splendidly across his chest, dis- 
playing as much and suppressing as little as he 
could :^ for he had no notion of concealing what he 
admired and thought decorative. . . . 

*"A present c'est un fait accompli," said he, 
readjusting his paletot. . . ."' 

To the last gesture of Monsieur it is superb. 

I have taken those scenes because they are of 
crucial importance as indications of what Charlotte 
Bronte was doing in Villette, and yet would do. 
They show not only an enormous advance in tech- 
nique, but a sense of the situation, of the schie a 
faire, which is entirely or almost entirely lacking 
in her earlier work. 

If there be degrees in reality, Lucy and Pauline 
de Bassompierre are only less real than M. Paul. 
And by some miracle their reality is not diminished 
by Charlotte Bronte's singular change of intention 
with regard to these two. Little Polly, the child of 
the beginning, the inscrutable creature of nerves, 
exquisitely sensitive to pain, fretting her heart out 
in love for her father and for Graham Bretton, is 
hardly recognisable in Pauline, Countess de Bas- 
sompierre. She has preserved only her fragility. 



176 THE THREE BRONTES 

her fastidiousness, her little air of inaccessibility. 
Polly is obviously predestined to that profound 
and tragic suffering which is Lucy Snowe's. 

*I watched Polly rest her small elbow on her 
small knee, her head on her hand; I observed her 
draw a square inch or two of pocket-handkerchief 
from the doll-pocket of her doll-skirt, and then I 
heard her weep. Other children in grief or pain cry 
aloud, without shame or restraint, but this being 
wept: the tiniest occasional sniff testified to her 
emotion/ 

Again (Polly is parted from her father): *When 
the street-door closed, she dropped on her knees at 
a chair with a cry — "Papa!" 

'It was low and long; a sort of "why hast thou 
forsaken me?" During an ensuing space of some 
minutes I perceived she endured agony. She went 
through, in that brief interval of her infant life, 
emotions such as some never feel; it was in her 
constitution : she would have more of such instants 
if she lived.' 

Polly is contrasted with the cold and disagreeable 
Lucy. 'I, Lucy Snowe, was calm,' Lucy says when 
she records that agony. The effect she gives, of 
something creepily insensitive and most unpleas- 
ant, is unmistakable in these early chapters. She 
watches Polly with a cold, analytic eye. 'These 
sudden, dangerous natures — sensitive as they are 
called — offer many a curious spectacle to those 



THE THREE BRONTES 177 

whom a cooler temperament has secured from par- 
ticipation in their vagaries.' When Polly, charming 
Polly, waits on her father at the tea-table, Lucy is 
impervious to her tiny charm. * Candidly speaking, 
I thought her a little busy-body.' When Graham 
Bretton repulses Polly, Lucy has some thoughts of 
'improving the occasion by inculcating some of 
those maxims of philosophy whereof I had ever 
a tolerable stock ready for application.' 

There is no sign in the beginning that this de- 
testable Lucy is to be heroine. But in Chapter 
Four Polly disappears and Lucy takes her place 
and plays her part. The child Polly had a suffering 
and passionate heart, for all her little air of fastid- 
iousness and inaccessibility. It is the suffering and 
passionate heart of Polly that beats in Lucy of the 
Pensionnat. There is only enough of the original 
Lucy left to sit in judgment on Ginevra Fanshawe 
and *the Parisienne.' 

The child Polly had an Imagination. '"Miss 
Snowe," said she in a whisper, "this is a wonderful 
book ... it tells about distant countries, a long, 
long way from England, which no traveller can 
reach without sailing thousands of miles over the 
sea. . . . Here is a picture of thousands gathered 
in a desolate place — a plain spread with sand. . . . 
And here are pictures more stranger than that. 
There is the wonderful Great Wall of China; here 
is a Chinese lady with a foot littler than mine. 



178 THE THREE BRONTES 

There is a wild horse of Tartary; and here — most 
strange of all — is a land of ice and snow without 
green fields, woods, or gardens. In this land they 
found some mammoth bones; there are no mam- 
moths now. You don't know what it was; but I 
can tell you, because Graham told me. A mighty 
goblin creature, as high as this room, and as long as 
the hall; but not a fierce, flesh-eating thing, Gra- 
ham thinks. He believes if I met one in a forest, it 
would not kill me, unless I came quite in its way; 
when it would trample me down amongst the 
bushes, as I might tread on a grasshopper in a hay- 
field without knowing it."' 

It is Polly's Imagination that appears again in 
Lucy's * Creative Impulse.' *I with whom that 
Impulse was the most intractable, the most capri- 
cious, the most maddening of masters ... a deity 
which sometimes, under circumstances apparently 
propitious, would not speak when questioned, 
would not hear when appealed to, would not, when 
sought, be found; but would stand, all cold, all 
indurated, all granite, a dark Baal with carven lips 
and blank eyeballs, and breast like the stone face 
of a tomb; and again, suddenly, at some turn, some 
sound, some long-trembling sob of the wind, at 
some rushing past of an unseen stream of electric- 
ity, the irrational Demon would awake unsolicited, 
would stir strangely alive, would rush from its ped- 
estal like a perturbed Dagon, calling to its votary 



THE THREE BRONTES 179 

for a sacrifice, whatever the hour — to its victim for 
some blood or some breath, whatever the circum- 
stances or scene — rousing its priest, treacherously 
promising vaticination, perhaps filling its temple 
with a strange hum of oracles, but sure to give half 
the significance to fateful winds, and grudging to 
the desperate listener even a miserable remnant — 
yielding it sordidly, as though each word had been 
a drop of the deathless ichor of its own dark veins.' 

That is Lucy. But when Polly reappears fitfully 
as Pauline de Bassompierre, she is an ordinary, 
fastidious little lady without a spark of imagina- 
tion or of passion. 

Now, in the first three chapters of Villette^ Char- 
lotte Bronte concentrated all her strength and all 
her art on the portrait of little Polly. The portrait 
of little Polly is drawn with the most delicate care 
and tender comprehension, and the most vivid and 
entire reality. I cannot agree with Mr. Swinburne 
that George Eliot, with her Totty and Eppie and 
Lillo, showed a closer observation of the ways, or a 
more perfect understanding of the heart of a child. 
Only little Maggie Tulliver can stand beside little 
Polly in Villette. She is an answer to every critic, 
from Mr. Swinburne downwards, who maintains 
that Charlotte Bronte could not draw children. 

But Lucy at fourteen is drawn with slight and 
grudging strokes, sufficient for the minor part she 
is evidently to play. Lucy at Bretton is a mere foil 



180 THE THREE BRONTES 

to little Polly. Charlotte Bronte distinctly stated 
in her letters that she did not care for Miss Snowe. 
* Lucy must not marry Dr. John ; he is far too youth- 
ful, handsome, bright - spirited, and sweet - tem- 
pered; he is a "curled darling" of Nature and of 
fortune, and must draw a prize in life's lottery. His 
wife must be young, rich, pretty; he must be made 
very happy indeed. If Lucy marries anybody, it 
must be the Professor — a man in whom there is 
much to forgive, much to "put up with." But I 
am not leniently disposed towards Miss Frost: 
from the beginning, I never meant to appoint her 
lines in pleasant places.' *As to the character of 
Lucy Snowe, my intention from the first was that 
she should not occupy the pedestal to which Jane 
Eyre was raised by some injudicious admirers. She 
is where I meant her to be, and where no charge of 
self -laudation can touch her.' 

But Lucy is not altogether where she was meant 
to be. When she reappears at the Pensionnat it is 
with 'flame in her soul and lightning in her eyes.' 
She reminds M. Paul 'of a young she wild creature, 
new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of 
fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in.' 

'"You look," said he, "like one who would 
snatch at a draught of sweet poison, and spurn 
wholesome bitters with disgust."' 

There is no inconsistency in this. Women before 
now have hidden a soul like a furnace under cold- 



THE THREE BRONTES 181 

ness and unpleasantness, and smothered shriek- 
ing nerves under an appearance of apathy. Lucy 
Snowe is one of them. As far as she goes, Lucy at 
Bretton is profoundly consistent with Lucy in 
Villette. It is not Lucy's volcanic outbreaks in the 
Pensionnat that do violence to her creator's original 
intention. It is the debasement of Polly and the 
exaltation of Lucy to her tragic role, the endow- 
ment of Lucy with Polly's rarest qualities, to the 
utter impoverishment of Pauline de Bassompierre. 
Polly in Villette is a mere foil to Lucy. 

Having lavished such care and love on Polly, 
Charlotte Bronte could not possibly have meant 
to debase her and efface her. How then did it hap- 
pen that Polly was debased and Lucy sublimely 
exalted.'^ 

It happened, I think, partly because for the first 
time Charlotte Bronte created a real living man. 
The reality of M. Paul Emanuel was too strong 
both for Lucy and for Charlotte Bronte. From 
the moment when he seized her and dragged her 
to the garret he made Lucy live as Charlotte Bronte 
had never contemplated her living. He made her 
live to the utter exclusion and extinction of Pauline 
de Bassompierre. 

And 'the despotic little man' dominates the 
book to an extent that Charlotte never contem- 
plated either. Until the storm carried him out of 
her sight, she was, I think, unaware of his domin- 



182 THE THREE BRONTES 

ion. Dr. John was her hero. She told Mr. George 
Smith, his prototype, that she intended him for the 
most beautiful character in the book (which must 
have been very gratifying to Mr. George Smith). 
He was the type she needed for her purpose. But 
he does not 'come off,' if only for the reason that 
she is consciously preoccupied with him. Dr. John 
was far more of an obsession to her than this little 
man, Paul Emanuel, who was good enough for 
Lucy Snowe. Pauline de Bassompierre was to be 
finished and perfected to match the high finish and 
perfection of Dr. John. Yet neither Pauline nor 
Dr. John 'came off.' Charlotte Bronte cared too 
much for them. But for Paul Emanuel she did not 
care. He comes off in a triumph of the detached, 
divinely free 'Creative Impulse.' 

Charlotte, with all her schemes, is delivered over 
to her genius from the moment when Lucy settles 
in Villette. To Charlotte's inexperience Brussels 
was a perfect hotbed for the germs of the real. 
That, I think, can be admitted without subscribing 
to the view that it was anything more. Once in the 
Pensionnat, Lucy entered an atmosphere of the 
most intense reality. From that point onward the 
book is literally inspired by the sense of atmosphere, 
that sense to which experience brings the stuff to 
work on. All Charlotte's experience and her suf- 
fering is there, changed, intensified, transmuted to 
an experience and a suffering which were not hers. 



THE THREE BRONTES 183 

This matured sense of actuality is shown again in 
the drawing of the minor characters. There is a 
certain vindictiveness about the portrait of Ginevra 
Fanshawe, a touch of that fierce, intolerant tem- 
per that caused Blanche Ingram to be strangled by 
the hands of her creator. Ginevra is not strangled. 
She lives splendidly; she flourishes in an opulence 
of detail. 

Experience may have partly accounted for Gin- 
evra. It could hardly have accounted for the little 
de Hamel, and he is perfect as far as he goes. 

It is because of this increasing mastery, this new 
power in handling unsympathetic types, because, 
in short, of its all round excellence, that Villette 
must count as Charlotte Bronte's masterpiece. It 
is marvellous that within such limits she should 
have attained such comparative catholicity of vis- 
ion. It is not the vast vision of Shirley, prophetic 
and inspired, and a little ineffectual. It is the lucid, 
sober, unobstructed gaze of a more accomplished 
artist, the artist whose craving for * reality ' is satis- 
fied; the artist who is gradually extending the 
limits of his art. When Charlotte Bronte wrote 
Jane Eyre she could not appreciate Jane Austen; 
she wondered why George Henry Lewes liked her so 
much. She objected to Jane Austen because there 
was no passion in her, and therefore no poetry and 
no reality. When she wrote Shirley she had seen 
that passion was not everything; there were other 



184 THE THREE BRONTES 

things, very high realities, that were not passion. 
By the time she wrote Villette, she saw, not only 
that there are other things, but that passion is the 
rarest thing on earth. It does not enter into the 
life of ordinary people like Dr. John, and Madame 
Beck, and Ginevra Fanshawe. 

In accordance with this tendency to level up, her 
style in Villette attains a more even and a more 
certain excellence. Her flights are few; so are her 
lapses. Her fearful tendency to rhetoric is almost 
gone. Gone too are the purple patches; but there 
is everywhere delicate colour under a vivid light. 
But there are countless passages which show the 
perfection to which she could bring her old imagina- 
tive style. Take the scene where Lucy, under the 
influence of opium, goes into Villette en fete. 

'The drug wrought. I know not whether Ma- 
dame had over-charged or under-charged the dose; 
its result was not that she intended. Instead of 
stupor, came excitement. I became alive to new 
thought — to reverie peculiar in colouring. A 
gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles 
sang, their trumpets rang an untimely sum- 
mons. . . .* 

*I took a route well known, and went up towards 
the palatial and royal Haute-Ville; thence the music 
I heard certainly floated; it was hushed now, but it 
might re waken. I went on: neither band nor bell- 
music came to meet me; another sound replaced it. 



THE THREE BRONTES 185 

a sound like a strong tide, a great flow, deepening 
as I proceeded. Light broke, movement gathered, 
chimes pealed — to what was I coming? Entering 
on the level of a Grande Place, I found myself, 
with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst a 
gay, living, joyous crowd. 

* Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the 
whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven 
are banished: the town by her own flambeaux, 
beholds her own splendour — gay dresses, grand 
equipages, fine horses and gallant riders, throng 
the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is 
a strange scene, stranger than dreams.' 

This is only beaten by that lyric passage that 
ends Villette; that sonorous dirge that rings high 
above all pathos, which is somehow a song of tri- 
umph, inspired by the whole power and splendour 
and magnificence of storm and death. 

'The sun passes the equinox; the days shorten, 
the leaves grow sere; but — he is coming. 

'Frosts appear at night; November has sent his 
fogs in advance; the wind takes its autumn moan; 
but — he is coming. 

'The skies hang full and dark — a rack sails from 
the west; the clouds cast themselves into strange 
forms — arches and broad radiations; there rise 
resplendent mornings — glorious, royal, purple, as 
monarch in his state; the heavens are one flame; 
so wild are they, they rival battle at its thickest — 



186 THE THREE BRONTES 

so bloody, they shame Victory in her pride. I know 
some signs of the sky, I have noted them ever since 
childhood. God, watch that sail ! Oh ! guard it ! 

*The wind shifts to the west. Peace, peace. Ban- 
shee — "keening" at every window! It will rise — 
it will swell — it shrieks out long: wander as I may 
through the house this night, I cannot lull the blast. 
The advancing hours make it strong; by midnight 
all sleepless watchers hear and fear a wild south- 
west storm. 

*That storm roared frenzied for seven days. It 
did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with 
wrecks; it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their 
fill of substance. Not till the destroying angel 
of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would 
he fold the wings whose waft was thunder — the 
tremor of whose plumes was storm.' 

* 

After Villette, the Last Sketch, the Fragment of 

Emma; that fragment which Charlotte Bronte read 

to her husband not long before her death. All he 

said was 'The critics will accuse you of repetition.' 

The critics have fulfilled his cautious prophecy. 

The Fragment passed for one of those sad things of 

which the least said the better. It was settled that 

Charlotte Bronte had written herself out, that if 

she had lived she would have become more and 

more her own plagiarist. There is a middle-aged 

lady in Emma, presumably conceived on the lines 



THE THREE BRONTES 187 

of Mrs. Fairfax and Mrs. Pryor. There is a girls' 
school, which is only not Lowood because it is so 
obviously Roe Head or Dewsbury Moor. There is 
a schoolmistress with sandy hair and thin lips and 
a cold blue eye, recalling Madame Beck, though 
there the likeness ceases. And in that school, ill- 
treated by that schoolmistress, there is a little ugly, 
suffering, deserted child. 

All this looks very much like repetition. But it 
does not shake my private belief that Emma is a 
fragment of what would have been as great a novel 
as Villette. There are indications. There is Mr. 
Ellin, who proves that Charlotte Bronte could 
create a live man of the finer sort, an unexploited 
masculine type with no earthly resemblance to 
Rochester or to Louis Moore or M. Paul. He is 
an unfinished sketch rather than a portrait, but 
a sketch that would not too shamefully have dis- 
credited Mr. Henry James. For there is a most 
modern fineness and subtlety in Emma ; and, for all 
its sketchy incompleteness, a peculiar certainty of 
touch, an infallible sense of the significant action, 
the revealing gesture. With a splendid economy of 
means, scenes, passages, phrases apparently slight 
are charged with the most intense psychological 
suggestion. When Mr. Ellin, summoned on urgent 
business by Miss Wilcox, takes that preposterously 
long and leisurely round to get to her, you know 
what is passing in the mind of Mr. Ellin as well as if 



188 THE THREE BRONTES 

you had been told. In that brief scene between Mr. 
ElHn and the schoolmistress, you know as well as if 
you had been told, that Miss Wilcox has lost Mr. 
Ellin because of her unkindness to a child. When 
the child, Matilda Fitzgibbon, falls senseless, and 
Mr. Ellin gives his inarticulate cry and lifts her 
from the floor, the enigmatic man has revealed his 
innermost nature. 

Now a fragment that can suggest all this with 
the smallest possible expenditure of phrases, is not 
a fragment that can be set aside. It is slight; but 
slightness that accomplishes so much is a sign of 
progress rather than of falling-off. We shall never 
know what happened to Matilda when Mr. Ellin 
took her from Miss Wilcox. We shall never know 
what happened to Mr. Ellin; but I confess that I 
am dying to know, and that I find it hard to forgive 
Mr. Nicholls for having killed them, so certain am 
I that they would have lived triumphantly if Char- 
lotte Bronte had not married him. 

Some of us will be profoundly indifferent to this 
issue; for Charlotte Bronte has no following in a 
certain school. She defies analysis. You cannot 
label her. What she has done is not * Realism,' 
neither is it 'Romance.' She displeases both by her 
ambiguity and by her lack of form. She has no 
infallible dramatic instinct. Even in Villette she 
preserves some of her clumsiness, her crudity, her 
improbability. The progress of *the Novel' in our 



THE THREE BRONTES 189 

day is towards a perfection of form and a reality 
she never knew. 

But 'reality' is a large term; and, as for form, 
who cared about it in the fifties? As for improb- 
ability — as M. Dimnet says — she is not more 
improbable than Balzac. 

And all these things, the ambiguity, the form- 
lessness and the rest, she was gradually correcting 
as she advanced. It is impossible to exaggerate the 
importance and significance of her attainment in 
Villette ; there has been so much confused thinking 
in the consecrated judgment of that novel. Villette 
owes its high place largely to its superior construc- 
tion and technique; largely and primarily to Char- 
lotte Bronte's progress towards the light, towards the 
world, towards the great undecorated reality. It is 
odd criticism that ignores the inevitable growth, the 
increasing vision and grasp, the whole indomitable 
advance of a great writer, and credits 'experience' 
with the final masterpiece. As a result of this confu- 
sion Villette has been judged ' final ' in another sense. 
Yes, final — this novel that shows every sign and 
token of long-maturing, long-enduring power. If 
Charlotte Bronte's critics had not hypnotised them- 
selves by the perpetual reiteration of that word ' ex- 
perience,' it would have been impossible for them, 
with the evidence of her work before them, to have 
believed that in Villette she had written herself out. 

She was only just beginning. 



190 THE THREE BRONTES 

Of Charlotte Bronte's Poems there is not much 
to say. They are better poems than Branwell's or 
Anne's, but that does not make them very good. 
Still, they are interesting, and they are important, 
because they are the bridge by which Charlotte 
Bronte passed into her own dominion. She took 
Wordsworth with his Poems and Ballads for her 
guide, and he misled her and delayed her on her 
way, and kept her a long time standing on her 
bridge. For in her novels, and her novels only, 
Charlotte was a poet. In her poems she is a novel- 
ist, striving and struggling for expression in a 
cramped form, an imperfect and improper medium. 
But most indubitably a novelist. Nearly all her 
poems which are not artificial are impersonal. They 
deal with 'situations,' with * psychological problems,* 
that cry aloud for prose. There is the 'Wife' who 
seems to have lived a long, adventurous life with 
* William ' through many poems ; there is the deserted 
wife and mother in ' Mementos ' ; there is Frances, the 
deserted maiden; there is 'Gilbert' with his guilty 
secret and his suicide, a triple domestic tragedy in 
the three acts of a three-part ballad; there is the 
lady in 'Preference,' who prefers her husband to 
her passionate and profoundly deluded lover; there 
is the woman in 'Apostasy,' wrecked in the con- 
flict between love and priest-craft; and there is 
little else beside. These poems are straws, showing 
the way of the wind that bloweth where it listeth. 



THE THREE BRONTES 191 

Too much has been written about Charlotte 
Bronte, and far too much has been read. You come 
away from it with an enormous mass of printed 
stuff wrecked in your memory, letters, simply hun- 
dreds of letters, legends and theories huddled to- 
gether in a heap, with all values and proportions 
lost; and your impression is of tumult and of suf- 
fering, and of a multitude of confused and incon- 
gruous happenings; funerals and flirtations, or 
something very like flirtations, to the sound of the 
passing bell and sexton's chisel; upheavals of soul, 
flights to and from Brussels, interminable years of 
exile, and of lurid tragic passion; years, intermin- 
able, monotonous years of potato-peeling and all 
manner of household piety; scenes of debauchery, 
horrors of opium and of drink; celebrity, cataclys- 
mal celebrity, rushings up to town in storm and 
darkness, dim coffee-houses in Paternoster Row, 
dinner-parties; deaths, funerals, melancholia; and 
still celebrity; years, interminable, monotonous 
years of blazing celebrity, sounds of the literary 
workshop overpowering the sexton's chisel; then 
marriage, sudden and swift; then death. And in 
the midst of it all, one small and rather absurd and 
obscure figure, tossed to and fro, said to be Char- 
lotte Bronte. 

What an existence! 

This is the impression created by the biblio- 
graphical total. But sweep four-fifths of it away. 



192 THE THREE BRONTES 

all the legends and half the letters, and sort and 
set out what remains, observing values and propor- 
tions, and you get an outer life where no great and 
moving event ever came, saving only death (Char- 
lotte's marriage hardly counts beside it) ; an outer 
life of a strange and almost oppressive simplicity 
and silence; and an inner life, tumultuous and pro- 
found in suffering, a life to all appearances frus- 
trate, where all nourishment of the emotions was 
reduced to the barest allowance a woman's heart 
can depend on and yet live; and none the less a life 
that out of that starvation diet raised enough of 
rich and vivid and superb emotion to decorate a 
hundred women's lives; an inner life which her 
genius fed and was fed from, for which no reality, 
no experience, could touch its own intensity of 
realisation. And, genius apart, in the region of 
actual and ostensible emotion, no one of us can 
measure the depth of her adoration of duty, or the 
depth, the force and volume of her passion for her 
own people, and for the earth trodden by their feet, 
the earth that covered them. Beside it every other 
feeling was temporary and insignificant. In the 
light of it you see Charlotte Bronte's figure for ever 
simple and beautiful and great; behind her for ever 
the black-grey setting of her village and the purple 
of her moors. That greatness and beauty and sim- 
plicity is destroyed by any effort to detach her 
from her background. She may seem susceptible 



THE THREE BRONTES 193 

to the alien influences of exile; but it is as an exile 
that she suffers ; and her most inspired moments are 
her moments of return, when she wrote prose like 
this: 'The moon reigns glorious, glad of the gale; 
as glad as if she gave herself to his fierce caress with 
love. No Endymion will watch for his goddess to- 
night: there are no flocks on the mountains.' 

Around the figure of Emily Bronte there is none 
of that clamour and confusion. She stands apart in 
an enduring silence, and guards for ever her secret 
and her mystery. By the mercy of heaven the swarm 
of gossips and of theorists has passed her by. She 
has no legend or hardly any. So completely has she 
been passed over that when Madame Duclauxcame 
to write the Life of Emily Bronte she found little to 
add to Mrs. Gaskell's meagre record beyond that 
story, which she tells with an incomparable sim- 
plicity and reticence, of Emily in her mortal illness, 
sitting by the hearth, combing her long hair till the 
comb slips from her fingers. 

That is worth all the reams, the terrible reams 
that have been written about Charlotte. 

There can be no doubt that Emily Bronte found 
her shelter behind Charlotte's fame; but she was 
protected most of all by the unapproachable, the 
unique and baffling quality of her temperament and 
of her genius. Her own people seem to have felt 
it; Charlotte herself in that preface to Wuthering 



194 THE THREE BRONTES 

Heights^ which stands as her last vindication and 
eulogy of her dead sister, even Charlotte betrays 
a curious reservation and reluctance. You feel that 
Emily's genius inspired her with a kind of sacred 
terror. 

Charlotte destroyed all records of her sister ex- 
cept her poems. Between six and seven hundred of 
her own letters have been published; there are two 
of Emily's. They tell little or nothing. And there 
was that diary she kept for Anne, where she notes 
with extreme brevity the things that are happening 
in her family. There never was a diary wherein the 
soul of the diarist was so well concealed. 

And yet, because of this silence, this absence of 
legend and conjecture, we see Emily Bronte more 
clearly than we can ever hope to see Charlotte now. 
Though hardly anything is known of her, what is 
known is authentic; it comes straight from those 
who knew and loved her, from Charlotte, from Ellen 
Nussey, from the servants at the Parsonage. Even 
of her outward and visible presence we have a 
clearer image. The lines are fewer, but they are 
more vivid. You see her tall and slender, in her 
rough clothes, tramping the moors with the form 
and the step of a virile adolescent. Shirley, the 
'bete fauve,' is Emily civilised. You see her head 
carried high and crowned with its long, dark hair, 
coiled simply, caught up with a comb. You see her 
face, honey-pale, her slightly high, slightly aquiline 



THE THREE BRONTES 195 

nose; her beautiful eyes, dark-grey, luminous; the 
*kind, kindling, liquid eyes' that Ellen Nussey saw; 
and their look, one moment alert, intent, and the 
next, inaccessibly remote. 

i I have seen such kind and kindling eyes in the 
face of a visionary, born with a profound, incurable 
indifference to the material event; for whom the 
Real is the incredible, unapparent harmony that 
flows above, beneath, and within the gross flux of 
appearances. To him it is the sole thing real. That 
kind and kindling look I know to be simply a light 
reflected from the surface of the dream. It is any- 
thing but cold; it has indeed a certain tender flame; 
but you would be profoundly mistaken if you ar- 
gued from it more than the faintest polite interest 
in you and your affairs. The kindling of Emily 
Bronte's eyes I take to have had at times something 
of the same unearthly quality. Strangers received 
from her an impression as of a creature utterly 
removed from them; a remoteness scarcely human, 
hard to reconcile with her known tenderness for 
every living thing. She seems to have had a pas- 
sionate repugnance to alien and external contacts, 
and to have felt no more than an almost reluctant 
liking for the lovable and charming Ellen Nussey. 
Indeed, she regarded Charlotte's friend with the 
large and virile tolerance that refuses to be charmed. 
And yet in the depths of her virginal nature there 
was something fiercely tender and maternal. There 



196 THE THREE BRONTES 

can be no doubt that she cared for Charlotte who 
called her 'Mine own bonnie love'; but she would 
seem to have cared far more for Anne who was 
young and helpless, and for Branwell who was help- 
less and most weak. 

Thus there is absolutely nothing known of Emily 
that destroys or disturbs the image that Haworth 
holds of her; nothing that detaches her for a mo- 
ment from her own people, and from her own place. 
Her days of exile count not at all in her thirty years 
of home. No separation ever broke, for one hour 
that counted, the bonds that bound her to her 
moors, or frustrated the divine passion of her com- 
munion with their earth and sky. Better still, no 
tale of passion such as they tell of Charlotte was 
ever told of Emily. 

It may be told yet, for no secret thing belonging 
to this disastrous family is sacred. There may be 
somewhere some awful worshipper of Emily Bronte, 
impatient of her silence and unsatisfied with her 
strange, her virgin and inaccessible beauty, who 
will some day make up some story of some love- 
affair, some passion kindred to Catherine Earn- 
shaw's passion for Heathcliff, of which her moors 
have kept the secret; and he will tell his tale. But 
we shall at least know that he has made it up. And 
even so, it will have been better for that man if he 
had never been born. He will have done his best 
to destroy or to deface the loveliness of a figure 



THE THREE BRONTES 197 

unique in literature. And he will have ignored the 
one perfect, the one essentially true picture of 
Emily Bronte, which is to be found in Maurice 
Maeterlinck's Wisdom and Destiny. 

To M. Maeterlinck she is the supreme instance 
of the self-sufficing soul, independent and regard- 
less of the material event. She shows the emptiness, 
the impotence, the insignificance of all that we call 
'experience,' beside the spirit that endures. 'Not 
a single event ever paused as it passed by her 
threshold; yet did every event she could claim take 
place in her heart, with incomparable force and 
beauty, with matchless precision and detail. We 
say that nothing ever happened; but did not all 
things really happen to her much more directly 
and tangibly than with most of us, seeing that 
everything that took place about her, everything 
that she saw or heard was transformed within her 
into thoughts and feelings, into indulgent love, 
admiration, adoration of life . . . .^ ' j 

'Of her happiness none can doubt. Not in the 
soul of the best of all those whose happiness has 
lasted longest, been the most active, diversified, 
perfect, could more imperishable harvest be found, 
than in the soul Emily Bronte lays bare. If to her 
there came nothing of all that passes in love, sor- 
row, passion or anguish, still did she possess all 
that abides when emotion has faded away.^ , 
^ Wisdom and Destiny. Translated by Alfred Sutro. 



198 THE THREE BRONTES 1 

What was true of Charlotte, that her inner hfe 
was luminous with intense realisation, was a hun- 
dred times more true of Emily. It was so true that 
beside it nothing else that can be said is altogether 
true. It is not necessary for a man to be convinced 
of the illusory nature of time and of material hap- 
penings in order to appreciate Charlotte's genius; 
but his comprehension of Emily's will be adequate 
or otherwise, according to the passion and sincerity 
with which he embraces that idea. And he must 
have, further, a sense of the reality behind the illu- 
sion. It is through her undying sense of it that 
Emily Bronte is great. She had none of the proud 
appearances of the metaphysical mind; she did 
not, so far as we know, devour, like George Eliot, 
whole systems of philosophy in her early youth. 
Her passionate pantheism was not derived; it was 
established in her own soul. She was a mystic, not 
by religious vocation, but by temperament and by 
ultimate vision. She offers the apparent anomaly 
of extreme detachment and of an unconquerable 
love of life. 

It was the highest and the purest passion that 
you can well conceive. For life gave her nothing in 
return. It treated her worse than it treated Char- 
lotte. She had none of the things that, after all, 
Charlotte had; neither praise nor fame in her life- 
time; nor friendship, nor love, nor vision of love. 
All these things * passed her by with averted head'; 



THE THREE BRONTES 199 

and she stood in her inviolable serenity and watched 
them go, without putting out her hand to one 
of them. You cannot surprise her in any piteous 
gesture of desire or regret. And, unlike Charlotte, 
she made it impossible for you to pity her. 

It is this superb attitude to life, this independ- 
ence of the material event, this detachment from 
the stream of circumstance, that marks her from 
her sister; for Charlotte is at moments pitifully 
immersed in the stream of circumstance, pitifully 
dependent on the material event. It is true that 
she kept her head above the stream, and that the 
failure of the material event did not frustrate or 
hinder her ultimate achievement. But Charlotte's 
was not by any means *a chainless soul.' It strug- 
gled and hankered after the unattainable. What 
she attained and realised she realised and attained 
in her imagination only. She knew nothing of the 
soul's more secret and intimate possession. And 
even her imagination waited to some extent upon 
experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion, of its 
tragic suffering, or of its ultimate appeasing, she, 
after all, wrote of things that might have happened 
to her. But when Emily wrote of passion, she wrote 
of a thing that, as far as she personally was con- 
cerned, not only was not and had not been, but 
never could be. It was true enough of Charlotte 
that she created. But of Emily it was absolutely 
and supremely true. 



200 THE THREE BRONTES 

Hers is not the language of frustration, but of 
complete and satisfying possession. It may seem 
marvellous in the mouth of a woman destitute of 
all emotional experience, in the restricted sense; 
but the real wonder would have been a Wuthering 
Heights born of any personal emotion; so certain is 
it that it was through her personal destitution that 
her genius was so virile and so rich. At its hour 
it found her virgin, not only to passion but to the 
bare idea of passion, to the inner and immaterial 
event. 

' And her genius was great, not only through her 
stupendous imagination, but because it fed on the 
still more withdrawn and secret sources of her soul. 
If she had had no genius she would yet be great 
because of what took place within her, the fusion 
of her soul with the transcendent and enduring life. 
. It was there that, possessing nothing, she pos- 
sessed all things; and her secret escapes you if you 
are aware only of her splendid paganism. She never 
speaks the language of religious resignation like 
Anne and Charlotte. It is most unlikely that she 
relied, openly or in secret, on *the merits of the 
Redeemer,' or on any of the familiar consolations of 
religion. As she bowed to no disaster and no grief, 
consolation would have been the last thing in any 
religion that she looked for. But, for height and 
depth of supernatural attainment, there is no 
comparison between Emily's grip of divine reality 



THE THREE BRONTES 201 

and poor Anne*s spasmodic and despairing clutch; 
and none between Charlotte's piety, her *God 
willing'; 'I suppose I ought to be thankful,' and 
Emily's acceptance and endurance of the event. 

I am reminded that one event she neither ac- 
cepted nor endured. She fought death. Her spirit 
lifted the pathetic, febrile struggle of weakness 
with ^corruption, and turned it to a splendid. Ti- 
tanic, and unearthly combat. 

And yet it was in her life rather than her death 
that she was splendid. There is something shocking 
and repellant in her last defiance. It shrieks dis- 
cord with the endurance and acceptance, braver 
than all revolt, finer than all resignation, that was 
the secret of her genius and of her life. 

There is no need to reconcile this supreme de- 
tachment with the storm and agony that rages 
through Wuthering Heights^ or with the passion for 
life and adoration of the earth that burns there, 
an imperishable flame; or with Catherine Earn- 
shaw's dream of heaven: 'heaven did not seem to 
be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping 
to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry • 
that they flung me out into the middle of the heath 
on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke 
sobbing for joy.' Catherine Earnshaw's dream has 
been cited innumerable times to prove that Emily 
Bronte was a splendid pagan. I do not know what 
it does prove, if it is not the absolute and immeasur- 



202 THE THREE BRONTES 

able greatness of her genius, that, dwelling as she 
undoubtedly did dwell, in the secret and invisible 
world, she could yet conceive and bring forth 
Catherine Earnshaw. 

It is not possible to diminish the force or to take 
away one word of Mr. Swinburne's magnificent 
eulogy. There was in the * passionate great genius 
of Emily Bronte,* *a dark, unconscious instinct as 
of primitive nature-worship.' That was where she 
was so poised and so complete ; that she touches earth 
and heaven, and is at once intoxicated with the 
splendour of the passion of living, and holds her 
spirit in security and her heart in peace. She 
plunged with Catherine Earnshaw into the thick 
of the tumult, and her detachment is not more 
wonderful than her immersion. 

It is our own imperfect vision that is bewildered 
by the union in her of these antagonistic attitudes. 
It is not only entirely possible and compatible, but 
if your soul be comprehensive, it is inevitable that 
you should adore the forms of life, and yet be aware 
of their impermanence; that you should aflSrm with 
equal fervour their illusion and the radiance of the 
reality that manifests itself in them. Emily Bronte 
was nothing if not comprehensive. There was no 
distance, no abyss too vast, no antagonism, no 
contradiction too violent and appalling for her 
embracing soul. Without a hint, so far as we know, 
from any philosophy, by a sheer flash of genius she 



THE THREE BRONTES 203 

pierced to the secret of the world and crystaUised 
it in two lines: — 

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling 
Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell, 

It is doubtful if she ever read a line of Blake; yet 
it is Blake that her poems perpetually recall, and it 
is Blake's vision that she has reached there. She 
too knew what it was — 

: To see a world in a grain of sand. 
And a Heaven in a wild flower. 
To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, 
And Eternity in an hour. 

She sees by a flash what he saw continuously; but . 
it is by the same light she sees it and wins her place 
among the mystics. 

Her mind was not always poised. It swang be- 
tween its vision of transparent unity and its love 
of earth for earth's sake. There are at least four 
poems of hers that show this entirely natural 
oscillation. 

In one, a nameless poem, the Genius of Earth 
calls to the visionary soul : — 

Shall earth no more inspire thee, 

Thou lonely dreamer now? 
Since passion may not fire thee. 

Shall nature cease to bow? 

Thy mind is ever moving 

In regions dark to thee; 
Recall its useless roving, 

Come back, and dwell with me. 



204 THE THREE BRONTES 

Few hearts to mortals given 

On earth so wildly pine; 
Yet few would ask a heaven 

More like this earth than thine. 

*The Night- Wind' sings the same song, lures 
with the same enchantment; and the human voice 
answers, resisting: — 

'Play with the scented flower. 

The young tree's supple bough, 
And leave my human feelings 
In their own course to flow.* 

But the other voice is stronger: — 

The wanderer would not heed me; 

Its kiss grew warmer still. 
*0h, come,' it sighed so sweetly; 
'It'll win thee 'gainst thy will. 

'Were we not friends from childhood? 

Have I not loved thee long? 
As long as thou the solemn night, 
• Whose silence wakes my song.' 

'And when thy heart is resting 

Beneath the church-aisle stone, 
I shall have time for mourning. 
And thou for being alone.' 

There are nine verses of 'The Night- Wind,' and 
the first eight are negligible; but, as for the last and 
ninth, I do not know any poem in any language 
that renders, in four short lines, and with such in- 
comparable magic and poignancy, the haunting 
and pursuing of the human by the inhuman, that 
passion of the homeless and eternal wind. ^ 



THE THREE BRONTES 205 

And this woman, destitute, so far as can be 
known, of all metaphysical knowledge or training, 
reared in the narrowest and least metaphysical of 
creeds, did yet contrive to express in one poem of 
four irregular verses all the hunger and thirst after 
the * Absolute' that ever moved a human soul, all 
the bewilderment and agony inflicted by the unin- 
telligible spectacle of existence, the intolerable tri- 
umph of evil over good, and did conceive an image 
and a vision of the transcendent reality that holds, 
as in crystal, all the philosophies that were ever 
worthy of the name. 

Here it is. There are once more two voices: one 
of the Man, the other of the Seer. 

THE PmLOSOPHER 

'Oh, for the time, when I shall sleep 

Without identity. 
And never care how rain may steep, 

Or snow may cover me! 
No promised heaven, these wild desires 

Could all, or half fulfil; 
No threatened hell, with quenchless fires. 

Subdue this restless will. 

*So said I, and still say the same; 

Still, to my death, will say — 
Three gods, within this little frame, 

Are warring night and day; 
Heaven could not hold them all, and yet 

They all are held in me; 
And must be mine till I forget 

My present entity! 



206 THE THREE BRONTES 

Oh, for the time, when in my breast 

Their struggles will be o'er! / 
Oh, for the day, when I shall rest, 

And never suffer more!* 

*I saw a spirit, standing, man. 

Where thou dost stand — an hour ago. 
And round his feet three rivers ran, 

Of equal depth, and equal flow — 
A golden stream — and one like blood 

And one like sapphire seemed to be; 
But where they joined their triple flood 
! It tumbled in an inky sea. 
The spirit sent his dazzling gaze 
( Down through that ocean's gloomy night; 
Then, kindling all, with sudden blaze, — 
' The glad deep sparkled wide and bright — 
White as the sun, far, far more fair 

Than its divided sources were!* 

'And even for that spirit, seer, 

I've watched and sought my lifetime long; 
Sought him in heaven, hell, earth and air. 

An endless search and always wrong. 
, Had I but seen his glorious eye 

Once light the clouds that wilder me, 
I ne'er had raised this coward cry 

To cease to think, and cease to be; 
I ne'er had called oblivion blest, 
t- Nor, stretching eager hands to death. 
Implored to change for senseless rest 

This sentient soul, this living breath — 
Oh, let me die — that power and will 
/ Their cruel strife may close. 
And conquered good and conquering ill 

Be lost in one repose!' 

That vision of the transcendent spirit, with the 
mingled triple flood of life about his feet, is one that 
Blake might have seen and sung and painted. 



THE THREE BRONTES 207 

The fourth poem, *The Prisoner,' is a fragment, 
and an obscure fragment, which may belong to a 
very different cycle. But whatever its place, it has 
the same visionary quality. The vision is of the 
woman captive, * confined in triple walls,' the * guest 
darkly lodged,' the 'chainless soul,' that defies its 
conqueror, its gaoler, and the spectator of its 
agony. It has, this prisoner, its own unspeakable 
consolation, the * Messenger'; — 

He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs. 
With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. 
Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, 
And visions rise and change that kill me with desire. 

But, first, a hush of peace — a soundless calm descends; 
The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends; 
Mute music soothes my breast — unuttered harmony. 
That I could never dream, till earth was lost to me. 

Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; 
My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels: 
Its wings are almost free — its home, its harbour found, 
Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound. 

That is the language of a mystic, of a mystic who 
has passed beyond contemplation; who has known 
or imagined ecstasy. The joy is unmistakable; 
unmistakable, too, is the horror of the return : — 

Oh! dreadful is the check — intense the agony — 
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; 
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; 
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. 

There is no doubt about those three verses; that 
they are the expression of the rarest and the most 



208 THE THREE BRONTES 

tremendous experience that is given to humanity to 
know. 

If *The Visionary' does not touch that supernal 
place, it belongs indubitably to the borderland. 

Silent is the house; all are laid asleep: 

One alone looks out o'er the snow-wreaths deep. 

Watching every cloud, dreading every breeze 

That whirls the wildering drift and bends the groaning trees. 

Cheerful is the hearth, soft the matted floor; 

Not one shivering gust creeps through pane or door; 

The little lamp burns straight, the rays shoot strong and far; 

I trim it well to be the wanderer's guiding-star. 

Frown, my haughty sir! chide, my angry dame! 
Set your slaves to spy; threaten me with shame; 
But neither sire nor dame, nor prying serf shall know, 
What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow. 

What I love shall come like visitant of air. 
Safe in secret power from lurking human snare, 
What loves me no word of mine shall e'er betray. 
Though for faith unstained my Ufe must forfeit pay. 

Burn then, little lamp; glimmer straight and clear — 

Hush! a rustling wing stirs, methinks, the air; 

He for whom I wait, thus ever comes to me: 

Strange Power! I trust thy might; trust thou my constancy. 

Those who can see nothing in this poem but the 
idealisation of an earthly passion must be strangely 
and perversely mistaken in their Emily Bronte. I 
confess I can never read it without thinking of one 
of the most marvellous of all poems of Divine Love : 
'En una Noche Escura.' 



THE THREE BRONTES 209 



EN UNA NOCHE ESCURA » 

Upon an obscure night 
Fevered with Love's anxiety 
(O hapless, happy phght!) 
I went, none seeing me. 
Forth from my house, where all things quiet be. 

Blest night of wandering 
In secret, when by none might I be spied, 
Nor I see anything; 
Without a Hght to guide 
Save that which in my heart burnt in my side. 

That light did lead me on 
More surely than the shining of noontide. 
Where well I knew that One 
Did for my coming bide; 
Where he abode might none but he abide, 

O night that didst lead thus; 
O night more lovely than the dawn of hght; 
O night that broughtest us 
Lover to lover's sight. 
Lover to loved, in marriage of delight! 



We know what love is celebrated there, and we do 
not know so clearly what manner of supernal pas- 
sion is symbolised in Emily Bronte's angel-lover. 
There is a long way there between Emily Bronte 
and St. John of the Cross, between her lamp-lit 
window and his 'Dark Night of the Soul,' and yet 
her opening lines have something of the premoni- 

1 'St. John of the Cross: The Dark Night of the Soul.' Translated 
by Arthur Symons in vol. n of his Collected Poems. 



210 THE THREE BRONTES 

tory thrill, the haunting power of tremendous sug- 
gestion, the intense, mysterious expectancy of his. 
The spiritual experience is somewhat different, but 
it belongs to the same realm of the super-physical ; 
and it is very far from Paganism. 

She wrote of these supreme ardours and mys- 
teries; and she wrote that most inspired and vehe- 
ment song of passionate human love, * Remem- 
brance': — 

Cold in the earth — and the deep snow piled above thee. 
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave! 
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee. . . . 

But * Remembrance' is too well known for quota- 
tion here. So is 'The Old Stoic' 

These are perfect and unforgettable things. But 
there is hardly one of the least admirable of her 
poems that has not in it some unforgettable and 
perfect verse or line: — 

And oh, how slow that keen-eyed star 

Has tracked the chilly grey! 
What, watching yet? how very far 

The morning lies away. 

That is how some watcher on Wuthering Heights 
might measure the long passage of the night. 

'The Lady to her Guitar,' that recalls the dead 
and forgotten player, sings : — 

It is as if the glassy brook 
Should image still its willows fair. 

Though years ago the woodman's stroke 
Laid low in dust their Dryad-hair. 



THE THREE BRONTES 211 

She has her *dim moon struggh'ng in the sky,' 
to match Charlotte's *the moon reigns glorious, 
glad of the gale, glad as if she gave herself to his 
fierce caress with love.' At sixteen, in the school- 
room,^ she wrote verses of an incomparable sim- 
plicity and poignancy: — 

A little while, a little while, 
^ The weary task is put away. 

And I can sing and I can smile. 
Alike, while I have holiday. 

Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart — 
What thought, what scene invites thee now? 

What spot, or near or far apart, 
Has rest for thee, my weary brow? 



The house is old, the trees are bare. 
Moonless above bends twilight's dome; 

But what on earth is half so dear — 
So longed for — as the hearth of home? 

The mute bird sitting on the stone. 
The dank moss dripping from the wall. 

The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, 
I love them — how I love them all ! 

Still, as I mused, the naked room. 

The alien firelight died away. 
And, from the midst of cheerless gloom, 

I passed to bright, unclouded day. 

* Madame Duclaux assigns to these verses a much later date — the 
year of Emily Bronte's exile in Brussels. Sir William Robertson NicoU 
also considers that *the "alien firelight" suits Brussels better than the 
Yorkshire hearth of "good, kind" Miss Wooler.' To me the school- 
room of the Pensionnat suggests an 'alien' stove, and not the light 
of any fire at all. 



212 THE THREE BRONTES 

A little and a lone green lane 

That opened on a common wide; 
A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain 

Of mountains circling every side. 

A heaven so clear, an earth so calm. 

So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air; 
And, deepening still the dream-like charm. 

Wild moor-sheep feeding everywhere. 

There was no nostalgia that she did not know. 
And there was no funeral note she did not sound; 
from the hopeless gloom of — 

In the earth — the earth — thou shalt be laid, 

A grey stone standing over thee; 
Black mould beneath thee spread, 

And black mould to cover thee. 

'Well — there is rest there. 

So fast come thy prophecy; 
The time when my sunny hair 

Shall with grass-roots entwined be.' 

But cold — cold is that resting-place 

Shut out from joy and liberty. 
And all who loved thy living face 

Will shrink from it shudderingly. 

From that to the melancholy grace of the moor- 
land dirge : — 

The linnet in the rocky dells, 

The moor-lark in the air, 
The bee among the heather-bells 

That hide my lady fair: 

The wild deer browse above her breast; 

The wild birds raise their brood; 
And they, her smiles of love caressed. 

Have left her solitude. 



[Facsimile of an original MS. poem hy Emily Bronte 
in the collection of W. W. Allis, Esq., Milwaukee.] 



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THE THREE BRONTES 21S 

Well, let them fight for honour's breath. 

Or pleasure's shade pursue — 
The dweller in the land of death 

Is changed and careless too. 

And if their eyes should watch and weep 

Till sorrow's source were dry, 
She would not, in her tranquil sleep. 

Return a single sigh. 

Blow, west wind, by the lowly mound. 

And murmur, summer-streams — 
There is no need of other sound 

To soothe my lady's dreams. 

There is, finally, that nameless poem — her last 
— where Emily Bronte's creed finds utterance. It 
also is well known, but I give it here by way of just- 
ification, lest I should seem to have exaggerated the 
mystic detachment of this lover of the earth : — 

No coward soul is mine. 
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere: 

I see Heaven's glories shine. 
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear. 

O God within my breast. 
Almighty, ever-present Deity! 

Life — that in me has rest, 
As I — undying Life — have power in thee! 

Vain are the thousand creeds 
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain; 

Worthless as withered weeds. 
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main. 

To waken doubt in one 
Holding so fast by thine infinity; 

So surely anchored on 
The stedfast rock of immortality. 



214 THE THREE BRONTES 

With wide-embracing love 
Thy spirit animates eternal years. 

Pervades and broods above. 
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears. 

Though earth and man were gone. 
And suns and universes ceased to be. 

And Thou wert left alone, 
Every existence would exist in Thee. 

There is not room for Death, 
Nor atom that his might could render void : 

Thou — Thou art Being and Breath, 
And what Thou art may never be destroyed. 

It is not a perfect work. I do not think it is by 
any means the finest poem that Emily Bronte ever 
wrote. It has least of her matchless, incommunic- 
able quality. There is one verse, the fifth, that 
recalls almost painfully the frigid poets of Deism 
of the eighteenth century. But even that associa- 
tion cannot destroy or contaminate its superb sin- 
cerity and dignity. If it recalls the poets of Deism, 
it recalls no less one of the most ancient of all meta- 
physical poems, the poem of Parmenides on Being: 

irojs o av cTTctT a-rroAoiTO tteAov, ttojs o av Ke ycvoiTO ; 
€1 ye yevou , ovk €(tt , ovo ci ttotc fiiXKu eo-tcrc/ai. 

TOJS, yerecri? fxkv airier (^ccrTai KaX a.TTL(TTO<; oA.€^/)o?. 

ovSk SiatpeVov e'cmv, eVei ttSv icrriv ofiolov • 
ovSe Ti TTT] Keveov . . . 

. . . lov yap iovTi TreXa^ci. 

Parmenides had not, I imagine, * penetrated' to 
Haworth; yet the last verse of Emily Bronte's 
poem might have come straight out of his tol irpo^ 



THE THREE BRONTES 215 

a\'r)6eiriv. Truly, an astonishing poem to have 
come from a girl in a country parsonage in the 
'forties. 

But the most astonishing thing about it is its 
inversion of a yet more consecrated form: *Thou 
hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless 
till they rest in Thee.' Emily BrontCdoes not fol- 
low ^t. Augustine. She has an absolutely inspired 
and independent insight : — 

Life — that in me has rest, 
As I — undying Life — have power in Thee! 

For there was but little humility or resignation 
about Emily Bronte. Nothing could be prouder 
than her rejection of the view that must have been 
offered to her every Sunday from her father's pul- 
pit. She could not accept the Christian idea of 
separation and the Mediator. She knew too well 
the secret. She saw too clearly the heavenly side 
of the eternal quest. She heard, across the worlds, 
the downward and the upward rush of the Two 
immortally desirous; when her soul cried she heard 
the answering cry of the divine pursuer : ' My heart 
is restless till it rests in Thee.' It is in keeping with 
her vision of the descent of the Invisible, who comes 

With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars, 

her vision of the lamp-lit window, and the secret, 
unearthly consummation. 
There is no doubt about it. And there is no 



216 THE THREE BRONTES 

doubt about the Paganism either. It seems at 
times the most apparent thing about Emily Bronte. 
The truth is that she revealed her innermost and 
unapparent nature only in her poems. That was 
probably why she was so annoyed when Charlotte 
discovered them. 

Until less than ten years ago it was commonly 
supposed that Charlotte had discovered all there 
were. Then sixty-seven hitherto unpublished poems 
appeared in America. And the world went on un- 
aware of what had happened. 

And now Mr. Clement Shorter, in his indefatig- 
able researches, has unearthed seventy-one more, 
and published them with the sixty-seven and with 
Charlotte's thirty -nine. ^ 

And the world continues more or less unaware. 

I do not know how many new poets Vigo Street 
can turn out in a week. But I do know that some- 
how the world is made sufficiently aware of some of 
them. But this event, in which Vigo Street has had 
no hand, the publication, after more than sixty 
years, of the Complete Poems of Emily Bronte, 
has not, so far as I know, provoked any furious 
tumult of acclaim. 

And yet there could hardly well have been an 
event of more importance in its way. If the best 

^ Complete Works of Emily Bronte. Vol. I. — Poetry. (Messrs. 
Hodder & Stoughton, 1910.) 



THE THREE BRONTES 217 

poems in Mr. Shorter*s collection cannot stand beside 
the best in Charlotte's editions of eighteen-forty-six 
and eighteen -fifty, many of them reveal an aspect of 
Emily Bronte's genius hitherto unknown and un- 
dreamed of; one or two even reveal a little more of 
the soul of Emily Bronte than has yet been known. 

There was no doubt many reasons for the world's 
indifference. The few people in it who read poetry 
at all do not read Emily Bronte much; it is as much 
as they can do to keep pace with the perpetual, 
swift procession of young poets out of Vigo Street. 
There is a certain austerity about Emily Bronte, 
a superb refusal of all extravagance, pomp, and 
decoration, which makes her verses look naked to 
eyes accustomed to young lyrics loaded with 'jewels 
five- words long.' About Emily Bronte there is no 
emerald and beryl and chrysoprase; there are no 
vine-leaves in her hair, and on her white Oread's 
feet there is no stain of purple vintage. She knows 
nothing of the Dionysiac rapture and the sensuous 
side of mysticism. She can give nothing to the 
young soul that thirsts and hungers for these things. 

It is not surprising, therefore, that the world 
should be callous to Emily Bronte. What you are 
not prepared for is the appearance of indifference 
in her editors. They are pledged by their office to a 
peculiar devotion. And the circumstances of Emily 
Bronte's case made it imperative that whoever 
undertook this belated introduction should show 



218 THE THREE BRONTES 

rather more than a perfunctory enthusiasm. Her 
alien and lonely state should have moved Mr. Clem- 
ent Shorter to a passionate chivalry. It has not 
even moved him to revise his proofs with perfect 
piety. Perfect piety would have saved him from 
the oversight, innocent but deplorable, of attribut- 
ing to Emily Bronte four poems which Emily 
Bronte could not possibly have written, which were 
in fact written by Anne: 'Despondency,' *In Mem- 
ory of a Happy Day in February,' 'A Prayer,' and 
'Confidence.' ^ No doubt Mr. Shorter found them 
in Emily's handwriting; but how could he, how 
could he mistake Anne's voice for Emily's .^^ 

My God (oh let me call Thee mine, 
Weak, wretched sinner though I be). 

My trembling soul would fain be Thine; 
My feeble faith still clings to Thee. 

It is Anne's voice at her feeblest and most de- 
pressed. 

It is perhaps a little ungrateful and ungracious 

to say these things, when but for Mr. Shorter we 

should not have had Emily's complete poems at all. 

And to accuse Mr. Shorter of present indifference 

(in the face of his previous achievements) would be 

iniquitous if it were not absurd; it would be biting 

the hand that feeds you. The pity is that, owing 

to a mere momentary lapse in him of the religious 

spirit, Mr. Shorter has missed his own oppor- 

^ Published among Charlotte Bronte's posthumous Selections in 
eighteen-fifty. 



THE THREE BRONTES 219 

tunity. He does not seem to have quite realised the 
splendour of his 'find.' Nor has Sir William Rob- 
ertson Nicoll seen fit to help him here. Sir William 
Robertson Nicoll deprecates any over - valuation 
of Mr. Clement Shorter's collection. 'It is not 
claimed/ he says, 'for a moment that the intrinsic 
merits of the verses are of a special kind.' And Mr. 
Clenjent Shorter is not much bolder in proffering 
his treasures. 'No one can deny to them,' he says, 
*a certain bibliographical interest.' 

Mr. Shorter is too modest. His collection includes 
one of the profoundest and most beautiful poems 
Emily Bronte ever wrote, ^ and at least one splen- 
did ballad, 'Douglas' Ride.'^ Here is the ballad, 
or enough of it to show how live it is with sound 
and vision and speed. It was written by a girl of 
twenty: — 

What rider up Gobeloin's glen 

Has spurred his straining steed. 
And fast and far from living men 

Has passed with maddening speed? 

I saw his hoof -prints mark the rock. 

When swift he left the plain; 
I heard deep down the echoing shock 

Re-echo back again. 



With streaming hair, and forehead bare. 

And mantle waving wide, 
His master rides; the eagle there 

Soars up on every side. 

* See pp. 241, 242. 

' I have removed the title from the preceding fragment to the bal- 
lad to which it obviously belongs. 



220 THE THREE BRONTES 

The goats fly by with timid cry. 

Their realm rashly won; 
They pause — he still ascends on high — 

They gaze, but he is gone. 

gallant horse, hold on thy course; 
The road is tracked behind. 

Spur, rider, spur, or vain thy force — 
Death comes on every wind. 

Hark! through the pass with threat'ning crash 

Comes on the increasing roar! 
But what shall brave the deep, deep wave, 

The deadly pass before? 

Their feet are dyed in a darker tide. 

Who dare those dangers drear. 
Their breasts have burst through the battle's worst. 

And why should they tremble here? 

'Now, my brave men, this one pass more. 

This narrow chasm of stone, 
And Douglas for our sov'reign's gore 
" Shall yield us back his own.* 

1 hear their ever-rising tread 

Sound through the granite glen; 
There is a tall pine overhead 
Held by the mountain men. 

That dizzy bridge which no horse could track 

Has checked the outlaw's way; 
There like a wild beast turns he back, 

And grimly stands at bay. 

Why smiles he so, when far below 

He spies the toiling chase.'' 
The pond'rous tree swings heavily, 

And totters from its place. 



THE THREE BRONTES 221 

They raise their eyes, for the sunny skies 

Are lost in sudden shade: 
But Douglas neither shrinks nor flies. 

He need not fear the dead. 

That is sufficiently unlike the Emily Bronte 
whom Charlotte edited. And there is one other 
poem that stands alone among her poems with a 
strange exotic beauty, a music, a rhythm and a 
magic utterly unlike any of the forms we recognise 
as hers : — 

Gods of the old mythology 

Arise in gloom and storm; 
Adramalec, bow down thy head. 

Reveal, dark fiend, thy form. 
The giant sons of Anakim 

Bowed lowest at thy shrine, 
And thy temple rose in Argola, 

With its hallowed groves of vine; 
And there was eastern incense burnt, 

And there were garments spread. 
With the fine gold decked and broidered. 

And tinged with radiant red, 
With the radiant red of furnace flames 

That through the shadows shone 
As the full moon when on Sinai's top 

Her rising light is thrown. 

It is undated and unsigned, and so unlike Emily 
Bronte that I should not be surprised if somebody 
were to rise up and prove that it is Coleridge or 
somebody. Heaven forbid that this blow should 
fall on Mr. Clement Shorter, and Sir William Rob- 
ertson Nicoll, and on me. There is at least one 
reassuring line. 'Reveal, dark fiend, thy form,' 
has a decided ring of the Brontesque. 



mt THE THREE BRONTES 

And here again, on many an otherwise negligible 
poem she has set her seal, she has scattered her fine 
things; thus: — 

No; though the soil be wet with tears, 

How fair so e'er it grew, 
The vital sap once perished 

Will never flow again; 
And surer than that dwelling dread 
The narrow dungeon of the dead. 

Time parts the hearts of men. 

And again, she gives a vivid picture of war in 
four lines: — 

In plundered churches piled with dead 

The heavy charger neighed for food, 
The wounded soldier laid his head 

'Neath roofless chambers splashed with blood. 

Again, she has a vision: — 

In all the hours of gloom 

My soul was rapt away. 
I stood by a marble tomb 

Where royal corpses lay. 

A frightful thing appears to her, * a 'shadowy- 
thing, most dim * : 

And still it bent above, 

Its features still in view; 

It seemed close by, and yet more far 

Than this world from the farthest star 

That tracks the boundless blue. 

Indeed 't was not the space 
Of earth or time between. 
But the sea of deep eternity. 
The gulf o'er which mortality 
Has never, never been. 



THE THREE BRONTES 223 

The date is June, eighteen-thirty-seven, a year 
earlier than the ballad. And here is the first sketch 
or germ of 'The Old Stoic': — 

Give we the hills our equal prayer, 

Earth's breezy hills and heaven's blue sea, 

I ask for nothing further here 
Than my own heart and liberty. 

And here is another poem, of a sterner and a 
sadder stoicism : — 

There was a time when my cheek burned 
To give such scornful words the lie, 

Ungoverned nature madly spurned 
The law that bade it not c^efy. 

Oh, in the days of ardent youth 

I would have given my life for truth. 

For truth, for right, for liberty, 

I would have gladly, freely died; 
And now I calmly bear and see 

The vain man smile, the fool deride. 
Though not because my heart is tame. 
Though not for fear, though not for shame. 

My soul still chokes at every tone 

Of selfish and self -clouded error; 
My breast still braves the world alone. 

Steeled as it ever was to terror. 
Only I know, howe'er I frown, 
The same world will go rolling on. 

October, eighteen-thirty-nine. It is the worldly 
wisdom of twenty-one ! 

If this, the ballad and the rest, were all, the world 
would still be richer by a wholly new conception of 
Emily Bronte, of her resources and her range. 



224 THE THREE BRONTES 

• But it is by no means all. And here we come to 
the opportunity which, owing to that temporary 
decline of fervour, Mr. Shorter has so unfortun- 
ately missed. 

He might have picked out of the mass wherein 
they lie scattered, all but lost, sometimes barely 
recognisable, the fragments of a Titanic epic. He 
might have done something to build up again the 
fabric of that marvellous romance, that continuous 
dream, that stupendous and gorgeous fantasy in 
which Emily Bronte, for at least eleven years, lived 
and moved and had her being. 

Until the publication of the unknown poems, 
it was possible to ignore the 'Gondal Chronicles.* 
They are not included in Mr. Clement Shorter's 
exhaustive list of early and unpublished manu- 
scripts. Nobody knew anything about them except 
that they were part of a mysterious game of make- 
believe which Emily and the ever-innocent Anne 
played together, long after the age when most of 
us have given up make-believing. There are sev- 
eral references to the Chronicles in the diaries of 
Emily and Anne. Emily writes in eighteen-forty- 
one: 'The Gondaland are at present in a threaten- 
ing state, but there is no open rupture as yet. All 
the princes and princesses of the Royalty are at the 
Palace of Instruction.' Anne wonders * whether the 
Gondaland will still be flourishing' in eigh teen- 
forty-five. In eighteen-forty-five Emily and Anne 



THE THREE BRONTES 225 

go for their first long journey together. * And during 
our excursion we were Ronald Macalgin, Henry 
Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, 
Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and 
Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces 
of instruction to join the Royalists, who are hard 
pressed at present by the victorious Republicans. 
The Gondals,' Emily says, * still flourish bright as 
ever.' Anne is not so sure. *We have not yet 
finished our *'Gondal Chronicles" that we began 
three years and a half ago. When will they be done.^ 
The Gondals are at present in a sad state. The 
Republicans are uppermost, but the Royalists are 
not quite overcome. The young sovereigns, with 
their brothers and sisters, are still at the Palace of 
Instruction. The Unique Society, about half a year 
ago, were wrecked on a desert island as they were 
returning from Gaul. They are still there, but we 
have not played at them much yet.' 

But there are no recognisable references to the 
Gondal poems. It is not certain whether Charlotte 
Bronte knew of their existence, not absolutely cer- 
tain that Anne, who collaborated on the Gondals, 
knew. 

'Bronte specialists' are agreed in dismissing the 
Chronicles as puerile. But the poems cannot be so 
dismissed. Written in lyric or ballad form, fluent 
at their worst and loose, but never feeble; powerful, 
vehement, and overflowing at their best, their cycle 



226 THE THREE BRONTES' 

contains some of Emily Bronte's very finest verse. 
They are obscure, incoherent sometimes, because 
they are fragmentary; even poems apparently com- 
plete in themselves are fragments, scenes torn out 
of the vast and complicated epic drama. We have 
no clue to the history of the Gondals, whereby we 
can arrange these scenes in their right order. But 
dark and broken as they are, they yet trail an epic 
splendour, they bear the whole phantasmagoria of 
ancestral and of racial memories, of * old, unhappy, 
far-off things, and battles long ago.' These songs 
and ballads, strung on no discernible thread, are the 
voice of an enchanted spirit, recalling the long roll 
of its secular existences; in whom nothing lives but 
that mysterious, resurgent memory. 

The forms that move through these battles are 
obscure. You can pick out many of the Gondal 
poems by the recurring names of heroes and of 
lands. But where there are no names of heroes and 
of lands to guide you it is not easy to say exactly 
which poems are Gondal poems and which are not. 
But after careful examination and comparison you 
can make out at least eighty-three of them that are 
unmistakable, and ten doubtful. 

All the battle-pieces and songs of battle, the 
songs of mourning and captivity and exile, the songs 
of heroism, martyrdom, defiance, songs, or frag- 
ments of songs, of magic and divination, and many 
of the love songs, belong to this cycle. What is 



THE THREE BRONTES 227 

more, many of the poems of eighteen-forty-six and 
of eighteen-fifty are Gondal poems. 

For in the Gondal legend the idea of the Doomed 
Child, an idea that haunted Emily Bronte, recurs 
perpetually, and suggests that the Gondal legend is 
the proper place of 'The Two Children,' and 'The 
Wanderer from the Fold,' which appear in the post- 
humous Selections of eighteen-fifty. It certainly in- 
cludes three at the very least of the poems of eighteen- 
forty-six: *The Outcast Mother,' 'A Death-Scene,' 
and 'Honour's Martyr.' 

It does not look, I own, as if this hunt for Gon- 
dal literature could interest a single human being; 
which is why nobody, so far as I know, has pur- 
sued it. And the placing of those four poems in the 
obscure Gondal legend would have nothing but 
*a bibliographical interest' were it not that, when 
placed there, they show at once the main track of 
the legend. And the main track of the legend brings 
you straight to the sources of Wuihering Heights 
and of the love poems. 

The sources of Wuthering Heights have been the 
dream and the despair of the explorer, long before 
Mrs. Humphry Ward tried to find them in the 
Tales of Hoffmann. And 'Remembrance,' one of the 
most passionate love poems in the language, stood 
alone and apart from every other thing that Emily 
Bronte had written. It was awful and mysterious 
in its loneliness. 



228 THE THREE BRONTES 

But I believe that 'Remembrance' also may be 
placed in the Gondal legend without any violence 
to its mystery. 

For supreme in the Gondal legend is the idea of a 
mighty and disastrous passion, a woman's passion 
for the defeated, the dishonoured, and the out- 
lawed lover; a creature superb in evil, like Heath- 
cliff, and like Heathcliff tragic and unspeakably 
mournful in his doom. He or some hero like him is 
* Honour's Martyr.' 

To-morrow, Scorn will blight my name. 

And Hate wiU trample me, 
Will load me with a coward's shame — 

A traitor's perjury. 

False friends will launch their covert sneers; 

True friends will wish me dead; 
And I shall cause the bitterest tears 

That you have ever shed. 

Like Heathcliff, he is the * unblessed, unfriended 
child ' ; the child of the Outcast Mother, abandoned 
on the moor. 

Forests of heather, dark and long. 

Wave their brown branching arms above; 

And they must soothe thee with their song. 
And they must shield my child of love. 

Wakes up the storm more madly wild, 
The mountain drifts are tossed on high; 

Farewell, unblessed, unfriended child, 
I cannot bear to watch thee die. 

In an unmistakable Gondal song Geraldine's lover 
calls her to the tryst on the moor. In the Gondal 



THE THREE BRONTES 229 

poem *Geraldine,' she has her child with her in a 
woodland cavern, and she prays over it wildly: — 

'Bless it! My Gracious God!' I cried, 

'Preserve Thy mortal shrine. 
For Thine own sake, be Thou its guide. 

And keep it still divine — 

*Say, sin shall never blanch that cheek. 

Nor suffering change that brow. 
Speak, in Thy mercy, Maker, speak, 
• And seal it safe from woe.' 

'r . 

The revellers in the city slept. 

My lady in her woodland bed; 
I watching o'er her slumber wept. 

As one who mourns the dead. 

Geraldine therefore is the Outcast Mother. In *The 
Two Children ' the doom gathers round the child. 

Heavy hangs the raindrop 

From the burdened spray; 
Heavy broods the damp mist 

On uplands far away. 

Heavy looms the dull sky, 

Heavy rolls the sea; 
And heavy throbs the young heart 

Beneath that lonely tree. 

Never has a blue streak 

Cleft the clouds since mom; 
Never has his grim fate 

Smiled since he was born. 

Frowning on the infant. 

Shadowing childhood's joy. 
Guardian-angel knows not 

That melancholy boy. , 



230 THE THREE BRONTES 

Blossom — that the west wind 

Has never wooed to blow. 
Scentless are thy petals. 

Thy dew is cold as snow! 

Soul — where kindred kindness 

No early promise woke. 
Barren is thy beauty, 

As weed upon a rock. 

Wither — soul and blossom! 

You both were vainly given: 
Earth reserves no blessing 

For the unblest of Heaven. 

The doomed child of the Outcast Mother is the 
doomed man, and, by the doom, himself an out- 
cast. The other child, the 'Child of delight, with 
sun-bright hair,' has vowed herself to be his guard- 
ian angel. Their drama is obscure; but you make 
out that it is the doomed child, and not Bran well 
Bronte, who is 'The Wanderer from the Fold.' 

How few, of all the hearts that loved, 

Are grieving for thee now; 
And why should mine to-night be moved 

With such a sense of woe? 

Too often thus, when left alone. 

Where none my thoughts can see. 
Comes back a word, a passing tone 
, From thy strange history. 

An anxious gazer from the shore — 

I marked the whitening wave. 
And wept above thy fate the more 

Because — I could not save. 

It recks not now, when all is over; 
But yet my heart will be 



THE THREE BRONTES 231 

A mourner still, though friend and lover 
Have both forgotten thee. 

Compare with this that stern elegy in Mr. 
Shorter's collection, *Shed no tears o'er that tomb.' 
A recent critic has referred this poem of reproba- 
tion also to Branwell Bronte — as if Emily could 
possibly have written like this of Branwell : — 

Shed no tears o'er that tomb. 

For there are angels weeping; 
Mourn not him whose doom 

Heaven itself is mourning. 



... he who slumbers there 

His bark will strive no more 
Across the waters of despair 

To reach that glorious shore. 

The time of grace is past. 

And mercy, scorned and tried. 
Forsakes to utter wrath at last 

The soul so steeled by pride. 

That wrath will never spare. 

Will never pity know; 
Will meet its victim's maddened prayer. 

With triumph in his woe. 

Shut from his Maker's smile 

The accursed man shall be; 
For mercy reigns a little while. 

But hate eternally. 

This is obviously related to 'The Two Child- 
ren/ and that again to 'The Wanderer from the 
Fold.' Obviously, too, the woman's lament in 'The 
Wanderer from the Fold' recalls the Gondal 



232 THE THREE BRONTES 

woman's lament for }i(t (lislionoured lover. For 
there arc two voices that si)eak and answer each 
other, the vo'ht of re|)rof)ation, and tJie voice of 
passion and ]>ily. Tiiis is the 'Gondal Woman's 
Lament ' : — 

Far, far is rnirUi witlidrawri: 

"J' is llin-c loiiK hours Ix-forc the mom. 

And I watch lonely, drearily; 

So come, thou shade, coiniuuiie with me. 

D<rHert,<;d one;! tfiy e()rj)se H<\h cold. 
And rnirif^led with a forei^^'u mould. 
Year after y<"ar the f^rass f^rows ^r(;cn 
Ahovo the dust wh(;re thou hast been. 

I will not name thy Mi^^'htcd name, 
'J'arnished hy unfor^ottcu shame, 
'J'liou^,'h not l)e<;ause my l)osom toni 
Joins tlie mud world in all its scorn. 

'J'hy phantom face is dark with woe. 
Tears have- left f^hastly traces th<-r(% 
• Those ceaseless tears! I wish their (low 

Could (jueneh thy wiltl desjjair. 

Th(\y deluj^e my heart like th(; rain 
On (;urs(;d Zamorna's howling j)lain. 
Yet when I hear thy foes deride, 
I must cling closely to thy side. 

Our mutual foes! They will not rest 
From tram|)lin^ on thy buried breast, 
(iluttin^ their hatred with the doom 
They |)ictijre thine beyond the tomb. 

(Wliich is what they did in the song of reprobation. 
But passion and pity know better. They know 
that) 



THE THREE BRONTES 233 

'. . . GfxJ is not like human kind, 
Man cannot nia^l the Alniij(hty mind; 
\(:iii!j;nrK:t: will fi';V';r torture thee, 
Nor hurt thy soul ct<jrnally. 



What have I dreamt? He lies asleep. 
With whom my heart would vainly weep; 
lie rests, and / endure the woe 
That left hi.i spirit long ago. 

This poem is not quoted for its beauty or its 
teehnique, but for its important pJaee in tlie story. 
You can track the great Gondal hero down by that 
one fantastic name, *Zamoma.* You have thus 
four poems, obviously related; and a fifth that 
links them, obviously, with the Gondal legend. 

It is difficuil to pick out from the confusion of 
these unsorted fragments all the henxjs of Kmily 
Bronte's saga. There is Gleneden, who kills a 
tyrant and is put in prison for it. There is Julius 
Angora, who 'lifts his impious eye* in the cathedral 
where the monarehs of Gondal are gathered; who 
leads the patriots of Gondal to the battle of Alme- 
dore, and was defeated there, and fell with his mr>r- 
tal enemy. He is bfdoved of ilosina, a crude proto- 
type of Catherine Karnshaw. 'King Julius left the 
south country' and remained in danger in the 
northern land because a passion for Jtosina kept 
him there. There is also Douglas of the *Ride.' lie 
appears again in the saga of the Queen Augusta, 
the woman of the 'brown mountain side.' But who 
he was, and what he was doing, and whether he 



234 THE THREE BRONTES 

killed Augusta or somebody else killed her, I cannot 
for the life of me make out. Queen Augusta, like 
Catherine Earnshaw, is a creature of passion and 
jealousy, and her lover has been faithless. She sings 
that savage song of defiance and hatred and lament- 
ation: 'Light up thy halls!' 

Oh! could I see thy lids weighed down in cheerless woe; 
Too full to hide their tears, too stern to overflow; 
Oh ! could I know thy soul with equal grief was torn. 
This fate might be endured — this anguish might be borne. 

How gloomy grows the night! *T is Gondal's wind that blows; 
I shall not tread again the deep glens whence it rose, 
I feel it on my face — Where, wild blast! dost thou roam? 
What do we, wanderer! here, so far away from home? 

I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow; 
But go to that far land where she is shining now; 
Tell her my latest wish, tell her my dreary doom; 
Say that my pangs are past, but hers are yet to come. 

And there is Fernando, who stole his love from 
Zamorna. He is a sort of shadowy forerunner of 
Edgar Linton. 

There is the yeoman Percy, the father of Mary 
whom Zamorna loved. And there is Zamorna. 

A large group of poems in the legend refer, ob- 
viously, I think, to the same person. Zamorna is 
the supreme hero, the Achilles of this northern 
Illiad. He is the man of sin, the * son'of war and love,* 
the child 'unblessed of heaven,* abandoned by its 
mother, cradled in the heather and rocked by the 
winter storm, the doomed child, grown to its doom. 



THE THREE BRONTES 235 

like Heathcliff. His story is obscure and broken, 
but when all the Zamorna poems are sorted from 
the rest, you make out that, like Heathcliff, he 
ravished from her home the daughter of his mortal 
enemy (with the difference that Zamorna loves 
Mary) ; and that, like Heathcliff, he was robbed of 
the woman that he loved. The passions of Zamorna 
are the passions of Heathcliff. He dominates a 
world of savage loves and mortal enmities like the 
world of Wuthering Heights. There are passages in 
this saga that reveal the very aspect of the soul of 
Heathcliff. Here are some of them. 

Zamorna, in prison, cries out to his * false friend 
and treacherous guide ' : — 

If I have sinned; long, long ago 

That sin was purified by woe. 

I have suffered on through night and day, 

I've trod a dark and frightful way. 

It is what Heathcliff says to Catherine Earn- 
shaw: 'I've fought through a bitter life since I last 
heard your voice.* 

And again: — 

If grief for grief can touch thee. 

If answering woe for woe. 
If any ruth can melt thee. 

Come to me now. 

It is the very voice of Heathcliff calling to Cathy. 

Again, he is calling to ' Percy,' the father of Mary, 
his bride, the rose that he plucked from its parent 
stem, that died from the plucking. 



236 THE THREE BRONTES 

Bitterly, deeply I've drunk of thy woe; 

When thy stream was troubled, did mine calmly flow? 

And yet I repent not; I'd crush thee again 

If our vessels sailed adverse on life's stormy main. 

But listen! The earth is our campaign of war, 

Is there not havoc and carnage for thee 
Unless thou couchest thy lance at me? 

He proposes to unite their arms. 

Then might thy Mary bloom blissfully still 
This hand should ne'er work her sorrow or ill. 



What! shall Zamorna go down to the dead 

With blood on his hands that he wept to have shed? 

The alliance is refused. Percy is crushed. Mary is 
dying, the rose is withering. 

Its faded buds already lie 
To deck my coffin when I die. 
Bring them here — 't will not be long, , 
^ 'T is the last word of the woeful song; 

And the final and dying words are sung 
To the discord of lute strings all unstrung. 

Have I crushed you, Percy? I 'd raise once more 

The beacon-light on the rocky shore. 

Percy, my love is so true and deep. 

That though kingdoms should wail and worlds should weep, 

I 'd fling the brand in the hissing sea. 

The brand that must burn unquenchably. 

Your rose is mine; when the sweet leaves fade. 

They must be the chaplet to wreathe my head. 

The blossoms to deck my home with the dead. 

Zamorna is tenderer than Heathcliff. He laments 
for his rose. 



THE THREE BRONTES 237 

On its bending stalk a bonny flower 

In a yeoman's home close grew; 

It had gathered beauty from sunshine and shower. 

From moonlight and silent dew. 

^■"■^ f - 

Keenly his flower the yeoman guarded. 

He watched it grow both day and night; 
From the frost, from the wind, from the storm he warded 

That flush of roseate light. 
And ever it glistened bonnilie 
Under the shade of the old yew-tree. 

The rose is blasted, withered, blighted. 

Its root has felt a worm, 
And like a heart beloved and slighted. 

Failed, faded, shrunk its form. 
Bud of beauty, bonny flower, 
I stole thee from thy natal bower. • 

I was the worm that withered thee . . . 

And he sings of Mary, on her death-bed, in her 
dehrium. He will not believe that she is dying. 

Oh ! say not that her vivid dreams 

Are but the shattered glass 
Which but because more broken, gleams 

More brightly in the grass. 
Her spirit is the unfathomed lake 
Whose face the sudden tempests break 
' To one tormented roar; 
But as the wild winds sink in peace 
All those disturbed waves decrease 
Till each far-down reflection is 

As life-like as before. 

Her death is not the worst. 

I cannot weep as once I wept 
Over my western beauty's grave. 



238 THE THREE BRONTES^ 

I am speaking of a later stroke, 

A death the dream of yesterday. 
Still thinking of my latest shock, 

A noble friendship torn away. 
I feel and say that I am cast 

From hope, and peace, and power, and pride. 

Without a voice to speak to you 
Save that deep gong which tolled my doom. 

And made my dread iniquity 

Look darker than my deepest gloom. 

But the crucial passage (for the sources) is the 
scene in the yeoman's hall where Zamorna comes to 
Percy. He comes stealthily. 

That step he might have used before 
When stealing on to lady's bower. 
Forth at the same still twilight hour. 
For the moon now bending mild above 
Showed him a son of war and love. 
His eye was full of that sinful fire 
Which oft unhallowed passions hght. 
It spoke of quickly kindled ire. 
Of love too warm, and wild, and bright. 
Bright, but yet sullied, love that could never 
Bring good in rising, leave peace in dechne. 
Woe to the gifted, crime to the giver. . . . 



Now from his curled and shining hair. 
Circling the brow of marble fair. 
His dark, keen eyes on Percy gaze 
With stern and yet repenting rays. 



He loves Percy whose rose was his, and he hates 
him, as Heathcliff might have loved and hated, 
but with less brutality. 



THE THREE BRONTES 239 

Young savage! how he bends above 
The object of his wrath and love. 
How tenderly his fingers press 
The hand that shrinks from their caress. 

The yeoman turns on *the man of sin.' 

'What brought you here? I called you not; 

• •••••••• 

Are you a hawk to follow the prey, 
• When mangled it flutters feebly away? 

A sleuth-hound to track the deer by his blood. 
When wounded he wins to the darkest wood. 
There, if he can, to die alone? 

It might have been HeathcHff and a Linton. 

So much for Zamorna. 

Finally, there are two poems in Mr. Shorter's 
collection that, verse for prose, might have come 
straight out of Wuihering Heights. One (inspired 
by Byron) certainly belongs to the Zamorna legend 
of the Gondal cycle. 

And now the house-dog stretched once more 
His hmbs upon the glowing floor; 
The children half resume their play. 
Though from the warm hearth scared away; 
The good-wife left her spinning-wheel 
And spread with smiles the evening meal; 
The shepherd placed a seat and pressed 
To their poor fare the unknown guest. 
And he unclasped his mantle now. 
And raised the covering from his brow. 
Said, voyagers by land and sea 
Were seldom feasted daintily. 
And cheered his host by adding stem 
He'd no refinement to unlearn. 



240 THE THREE BRONTES 

Which is what Heathcliff would have said sternlyo 
Observe the effect of him. 

A silence settled on the room, 

The cheerful welcome sank to gloom; 

But not those words, though cold or high. 

So froze their hospitable joy. 

No — there was something in his face. 

Some nameless thing which hid not grace. 

And something in his voice's tone 

Which turned their blood as chill as stone. 

The ringlets of his long black hair 

Fell o'er a cheek most ghastly fair. 

Youthful he seemed — but worn as they 

Who spend too soon their youthful day. 

When his glance dropped, 't was hard to quell 

Unbidden feelings' hidden swell; -^ 

And Pity scarce her tears could hide, 

So sweet that brow with all its pride. 

But when upraised his eye would dart 

An icy shudder through the heart. 

Compassion changed to horror then. 

And fear to meet that gaze again. 

It was not hatred's tiger-glare. 

Nor the wild anguish of despair; 

It was not either misery 

Which quickens friendship's sympathy; 

No — hghtning all unearthly shone 

Deep in that dark eye's circling zone. 

Such withering lightning as we deem 

None but a spirit's look may beam; 

And glad were all when he turned away 

And wrapt him in his mantle grey. 

And hid his head upon his arm. 

And veiled from view his basilisk charm. 

That, I take it, is Zamorna, that Byronic hero, 
again; but it is also uncommonly like Heathcliff, 
with *his basilisk eyes.' And it is dated July 1839, 
seven years before Wuthering Heights was written. 



THE THREE BRONTES 241 

The other crucial instance is a nameless poem to 
the Earth. 

I see around me piteous tombstones grey 
Stretching their shadows far away. 
Beneath the turf my footsteps tread 
Lie low and lone the silent dead; 
Beneath the turf, beneath the mould. 
For ever dark, for ever cold. 
And my eyes cannot hold the tears 
That memory hoards from vanished years. 
• For Time and Death and mortal pain 

Give wounds that will not heal again. 
Let me remember half the woe 
I've seen and heard and felt below. 
And heaven itself, so pure and blest. 
Could never give my spirit rest. 
Sweet land of light! Thy children fair 
Know nought akin to our despair; 
Nor have they felt, nor can they tell 

What tenants haunt each mortal cell. 

What gloomy guests we hold within. 

Torments and madness, fear and sin! 

Well, may they live in ecstasy 

Their long eternity of joy; 

At least we would not bring them down 

With us to weep, with us to groan. 

No, Earth would wish no other sphere 

To taste her cup of suffering drear; 

She turns from heaven a tearless eye 

And only mourns that we must die! 

Ah mother! what shalt comfort thee 

Li all this boundless misery? 

To cheer our eager eyes awhile. 

We see thee smile, how fondly smile! 

But who reads not through the tender glow 

Thy deep, unutterable woe? 

Indeed no darling hand above 

Can cheat thee of thy children's love. 

We all, in hfe's departing shine. 

Our last, dear longings blend with thine, 



242 THE THREE BRONTES 

And struggle still, and strive to trace 
With clouded gaze thy darling face. 
We would not leave our nature home 
For any world beyond the tomb. 
No, mother, on thy kindly breast 
Let us be laid in lasting rest, 
Or waken but to share with thee 
A mutual immortality.' 

There is the whole spirit of Wuthering Heights; 
the spirit of Catherine Earnshaw's dream; the 
spirit that in the last page broods over the moor- 
land graveyard. It is instinct with a more than pa- 
gan adoration of the tragic earth, adored because 
of her tragedy. 

It would be dangerous to assert positively that 
* Remembrance' belongs to thejsame song-cycle; 
but it undoubtedly belongs to the same cycle, or 
rather cyclone, of passion; the cyclone that rages in 
the hearts of HeathclifiP and of Catherine. The gen- 
ius of Emily Bronte was so far dramatic that, if you 
could divide her poems into the personal and im- 
personal, the impersonal would be found in a mass 
out of all proportion to the other. But, with very 
few exceptions, you cannot so divide them ; for in 
her continuous and sustaining dream, the vision 
that lasted for at least eleven years of her life, 
from eighteen-thirty-four, the earliest date of any 
known Gondal poem, to eighteen-forty-five, the 
last appearance of the legend, she was these people; 
she lived, indistinguishably and interchangeably, 
their tumultuous and passionate life. Sometimes 



THE THREE BRONTES 243 

she is the lonely spirit that looks on in immortal 
irony, raised above good and evil. More often she 
is a happy god, immanent in his restless and mani- 
fold creations, rejoicing in this multiplication of 
himself. It is she who fights and rides, who loves 
and hates, and suffers and defies. She heads one 
poem naifly: 'To the Horse Black Eagle that I 
rode at the Battle of Zamorna.' The horse / rode! 
If it were not glorious, it would be (when you 
think what her life was in that Parsonage) most 
mortally pathetic. 

But it is all in keeping. For, as she could dare 
the heavenly, divine adventure, so there was no 
wild and ardent adventure of the earth she did 
not claim. 

Love of life and passionate adoration of the 
earth, adoration and passion fiercer than any pagan 
knew, burns in Wuthering Heights. And if that 
were all, it would be impossible to say whether her 
mysticism or her paganism most revealed the soul 
of Emily Bronte. 

In Wuthering Heights we are plunged apparently 
into a world of most unspiritual lusts and hates and 
cruelties; into the very darkness and thickness of 
elemental matter; a world that would be chaos, but 
for the iron Necessity that brings its own terrible 
order, its own implacable law of lust upon lust be- 
gotten, hate upon hate, and cruelty upon cruelty, 



244 THE THREE BRONTES 

through the generations of Heathcliffs and of Earn- 
shaws. 

Hindley Earnshaw is brutal to the foundling, 
Heathcliff, and degrades him. Heathcliff, when his 
hour comes, pays back his wrong with the interest 
due. He is brutal beyond brutality to Hindley 
Earnshaw, and he degrades Hareton, Hindley's 
son, as he himself was degraded; but he is not 
brutal to him. The frustrated passion of Catherine 
Earnshaw for Heathcliff, and of Heathcliff for Cath- 
erine, hardly knows itself from hate; they pay each 
other back torture for torture, and pang for hope- 
less pang. When Catherine marries Edgar Linton, 
Heathcliff marries Isabella, Edgar's sister, in order 
that he may torture to perfection Catherine and 
Edgar and Isabella. His justice is more than poetic. 
The love of Catherine Earnshaw was all that he 
possessed. He knows that he has lost it through 
the degradation that he owes to Hindley Earn- 
shaw. It is because an Earnshaw and a Linton be- 
tween them have robbed him of all that he pos- 
sessed, that, when his hour comes, he pays himself 
back by robbing the Lintons and the Earnshaws of 
all that they possess, their Thrushcross Grange and 
Wuthering Heights. He loathes above all loathly 
creatures, Linton, his own son by Isabella. The 
white-blooded thing is so sickly that he can hardly 
keep it alive. But with an unearthly cruelty he 
cherishes, he nourishes this spawn till he can marry 



THE THREE BRONTES 245 

it on its death-bed to the younger Catherine, the 
child of Catherine Earnshaw and of Edgar Linton. 
This supreme deed accompHshed, he lets the crea- 
ture die, so that Thrushcross Grange may fall into 
his hands. Judged by his bare deeds, Heathcliff 
seems a monster of evil, a devil without any fiery 
infernal splendour, a mean and sordid devil. 

But — and this is what makes Emily Bronte's 
work stupendous — not for a moment can you 
judge Heathcliff by his bare deeds. Properly speak- j 
ing, there are no bare deeds to judge him by. Each \ 
deed comes wrapt in its own infernal glamour, trail- ; 
ing a cloud of supernatural splendour. The whole 
drama moves on a plane of reality superior to any _^ 
deed. The spirit of it, like Emily Bronte's spirit, is 
superbly regardless of the material event. As far 
as material action goes Heathcliff is singularly 
inert. He never seems to raise a hand to help his 
vengeance. He lets things take their course. He lets 
Catherine marry Edgar Linton and remain mar- 
ried to him. He lets Isabella's passion satisfy 
itself. He lets Hindley Earnshaw drink himself to 
death. He lets Hareton sink to the level of a boor. 
He lets Linton die. His most overt and violent ac- 
tion is the capture of the younger Catherine. And 
even there he takes advantage of the accident that 
brings her to the door of Wuthering Heights. He 
watches and bides his time with the intentness of 
a brooding spirit that in all material happenings 



246 THE THREE BRONTES 

seeks its own. He makes them his instruments of 
vengeance. And Heathcliff's vengeance, like his 
passion for Catherine, is an immortal and immate- 
rial thing. He shows how little he thinks of sordid, 
tangible possession; for, when his vengeance is 
complete, when Edgar Linton and Linton Heath- 
cliff are dead and their lands and houses are his, he 
becomes utterly indifferent. He falls into a melan- 
choly. He neither eats nor drinks. He shuts him- 
self up in Cathy's little room and is found dead 
there, lying on Cathy's bed. 

If there never was anything less heavenly, less 
Christian, than this drama, there never was any- 
thing less earthly, less pagan. There is no name for 
it. It is above all our consecrated labels and dis- 
tinctions. It has been called a Greek tragedy, with 
the iEschylean motto, tw hpaa-avn iradelv. But it 
is not Greek any more than it is Christian; and if it 
has a moral, its moral is far more rw Tradovri iraOelv. 
It is the drama of suffering born of suffering, and 
confined strictly within the boundaries of the soul. 

Madame Duclaux (whose criticism of Wuthering 
Heights is not to be surpassed or otherwise gain- 
said) finds in it a tragedy of inherited evil. She 
thinks that Emily Bronte was greatly swayed by the 
doctrine of heredity. '"No use," she seems to be 
saying, "in waiting for the children of evil parents 
to grow, of their own will and unassisted, straight 
and noble. The very quality of their will is as in- 



THE THREE BRONTES 247 

herited as their eyes and hair. Heathchfif is no fiend 
orgobhn; the untrained, doomed child of some haK- 
savage sailor's holiday, violent and treacherous. 
And how far shall we hold the sinner responsible 
for a nature which is itself the punishment of some 
forefather's crime .f^"' 

All this, I cannot help thinking, is alien to the 
spirit of Wuthering Heights^ and to its greatness. 
It is not really any problem of heredity that we 
have here. Heredity is, in fact, ignored. Heath- 
cliff's race and parentage are unknown. There is 
no resemblance between the good old Earnshaws, 
who adopted him, and their son Hindley. Hareton 
does not inherit Hindley's drunkenness or his 
cruelty. It is not through any physical consequence 
of his father's vices that Hareton suffers. Linton is 
in no physical sense the son of Heathcliff . If Cath- 
erine Linton inherits something of Catherine Earn- 
shaw's charm and temper, it is because the younger 
Catherine belongs to another world; she is an in- 
ferior and more physical creature. She has nothing 
in her of Catherine Earnshaw's mutinous passion, 
the immortal and unearthly passion which made 
that Catherine alive and killed her. Catherine Lin- 
ton's ' little romance ' is altogether another affair. 

The world of Heathcliff and Catherine Earn- 
shaw is a world of spiritual affinities, of spiritual 
contacts and recoils, where love begets and bears 
love, and hate is begotten of hate and born of 



248 THE THREE BRONTES 

shame. Even Linton Heathcliff, that * whey-faced, 
whining wretch,' that physical degenerate, demon- 
strates the higher law. His weakness is begotten 
by his father's loathing on his mother's terror. 

Never was a book written with a more sublime 
ignoring of the physical. You only get a taste of it 
once in Isabella's unwholesome love for Heathcliff; 
that is not passion, it is sentiment, and it is 
thoroughly impure. And you get a far-off vision of 
it again in Isabella's fear of Heathcliff. Heathcliff 
understood her. He says of her, '"No brutality 
disgusted her. . . . I've sometimes relented, from 
pure lack of invention, in my experiments on what 
she could endure and still creep shamefully back." ' 
This civilised creature is nearer to the animals, 
there is more of the earth in her than in Catherine 
or in Heathcliff. They are elemental beings, if you 
like, but their element is fire. They are clean, as all 
fiery, elemental things are clean. 

True, their love found violent physical expres- 
sion; so that M. Maeterlinck can say of them and 
their creator : * We feel that one must have lived for 
thirty years under chains of burning kisses to learn 
what she has learned ; to dare so confidently set forth, 
with such minuteness, such unerring certainty, the 
delirium of those two lovers of Wuthering Heights; 
to mark the self-conflicting movements of the ten- 
derness that would make suffer, and the cruelty 
that would make glad, the felicity that prayed for 



THE THREE BRONTES 249 

death, and the despair that clung to life, the repul- 
sion that desired, the desire drunk with repulsion — 
love surcharged with hatred, hatred staggering be- 
neath its load of love.* ^ 

True; but the passion that consumes Catherine 
and HeathcHff, that burns their bodies and destroys 
them, is nine-tenths a passion of the soul. It taught 
them nothing of the sad secrets of the body. Thus 
Catherine's treachery to HeathcHff is an uncon- 
scious treachery. It is her innocence that makes it 
possible. She goes to Edgar Linton's arms with 
blind eyes, in utter, childlike ignorance, not know- 
ing what she does till it is done and she is punished 
for it. She is punished for the sin of sins, the sun- 
dering of the body from the soul. All her life after 
she sees her sin. She has taken her body, torn it 
apart and given it to Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff 
has her soul. 

*"You love Edgar Linton,'" Nelly Dean says, 
* "and Edgar loves you . . . where is the obstacle?" 

'''Here! and here!'' repHed Catherine, striking 
one hand on her forehead, and the other on her 
breast: *'in whichever place the soul lives. In my 
soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong." 
. . . *' I've no more business to marry Edgar Lin- 
ton than I have to be in heaven ; and if the wicked 
man in there had n't brought Heathcliff so low, I 
should n't have thought of it. It would degrade 
^ Wisdom and Destiny. Translated by Alfred Sutro. 



250 THE THREE BRONTES 

me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know 
how I love him, and that, not because he's hand- 
some, Nelly, but because he 's more myself than I 
am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine 
are the same."' 

Not only are they made of the same stuff, but 
Heathcliff is her soul. 

'"I cannot express it; but surely you and every- 
body have a notion that there is, or should be, an 
existence of yours beyond you. What were the use 
of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? 
My great miseries in this world have been Heath- 
cliff's miseries . . . my great thought in living is 
himself. . . . Nelly ! I am Heathcliff ! He 's always, 
always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more 
than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my own 
being.'" 

That is her * secret.' 

Of course, there is Cathy's other secret — her 
dream, which passes for Emily Bronte's 'pretty 
piece of Paganism.' But it is only one side of Emily 
Bronte. And it is only one side of Catherine Earn- 
shaw. When Heathcliff turns from her for a mo- 
ment in that last scene of passion, she says: *"0h, 
you see, Nelly, he would not relent a moment to 
keep me out of the grave. That is how I 'm loved ! 
Well, never mind. That is not my Heathcliff. I 
shall love mine yet; and take him with me: he's in 
my soul. And," she added musingly, "the thing 



THE THREE BRONTES 251 

that irks me most is this shattered prison, after all. 
I 'm tired of being enclosed here. I 'm wearying to 
escape into that glorious world, and to be always 
there: not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearn- 
ing for it through the walls of an aching heart; but 
really with it and in it. Nelly, you think you are 
better and more fortunate than I; in full health 
and strength : you are sorry for me — very soon 
that will be altered. I shall be sorry for you. I 
shall be incomparably above and beyond you all." ' 

True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs 
like a choric hymn through all the tragedy. Earth 
is the mother and the nurse of these children. They 
are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives 
them the final consolation. 

Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern trag- 
edy is far enough from Earth, the All-Mother. The 
tumult of Wuthering Heights ceases when Heath- 
cliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and 
silence of exhaustion. And the drama closes, not in 
hopeless gloom, the agony of damned souls, but in 
redemption, reconciliation. 

Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar 
Linton, loves Hareton, the child of Hindley Earn- 
shaw. The evil spirit that possessed these two dies 
with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Cather- 
ine is a mixed creature, half-spiritualised by much 
suffering. Hareton is a splendid animal, unspirit- 
ualised and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; 



252 THE THREE BRONTES 

and you gather that by that act of redemption, 
somehow, the souls of Catherine and Heathdiff are 
appeased. 

The whole tremendous art of the book is in this 
wringing of strange and terrible harmony out of 
raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence, soft as 
a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain. 

'I sought, and soon discovered, the three head- 
stones on the slope next the moor: the middle one 
grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton's only 
harmonised by the turf and moss creeping up its 
foot; Heathcliff's still bare. 

*I lingered round them, under that benign sky: 
watched the moths fluttering among the heath and 
hare-bells, listened to the soft wind breathing 
through the grass, and wondered how any one 
could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleep- 
ers in that quiet earth.' 

But that is not the real end, any more than Lock- 
wood's arrival at Wuthering Heights is the begin- 
ning. It is only Lock wood recovering himself; the 
natural man's drawing breath after the passing of 
the supernatural. 

For it was not conceivable that the more than 
human love of Heathcliff and Catherine should 
cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It was 
not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in 
the fifteenth chapter, should pass out of the tale. 



THE THREE BRONTES 253 

As a matter of fact, she never does pass out of it. 
She is more in it than ever. 

For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely 
on the invisible and immaterial plane; it is the pur- 
suing, the hunting to death of an earthly creature 
by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it 
at the very beginning when the ghost of the child 
Catherine is heard and felt by Lockwood; though 
it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in the 
hour after Catherine's death, upon Heathcliff's 
passionate invocation : *" Catherine Earnshaw,may 
you not rest as long as I am living! You said I 
killed you — haunt me, then ! The murdered do 
haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that 
ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always 
— take any form — drive me mad ! Only do not 
leave me in this abyss, where I cannot iBnd you! 
Oh God! it is unbearable! I cannot live without 
my life ! I cannot live without my soul ! " * 

It begins and is continued through eighteen years. 
He cannot see her, but he is aware of her. He is first 
aware on the evening of the day she is buried. He 
goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made 
grave, saying to himself, * "I 'II have her in my arms 
again! If she be cold, I'll think it is the north wind 
that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep." ' 
A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. * "I appeared 
to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet- 
laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and 



254 THE THREE BRONTES 

blood was by; but as certainly as you perceive the 
approach to some substantial body in the dark, 
though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt 
Cathy was there; not under me, but on the earth. 
. . . Her presence was with me; it remained 
while I refilled the grave, and led me home."* 

But she cannot get through to him completely, 
because of the fleshly body that he wears. 

He goes up to his room, his room and hers. '"I 
looked round impatiently — I felt her by me — 
I could almost see her, and yet I could not ! . . . She 
showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to 
me! And since then, sometimes more and some- 
times less, I've been the sport of that intolerable 
torture! . . . When I sat in the house with Hare- 
ton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; 
when I walked on the moors I should meet her com- 
ing in. When I went from home, I hastened to re- 
turn; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was 
certain ! And when I slept in her chamber — I was 
beaten out of that. I could n't lie there; for the mo- 
ment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the 
window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the 
room, or even resting her darling head on the same 
pillow as she did when a child ; and I must open my 
lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hun- 
dred times a night — to be always disappointed ! 
It racked me! . . . It was a strange way of killing: 
not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to 



THE THREE BRONTES 255 

beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eight- 
een years!"' 

In all Catherine's appearances you feel the im- 
pulse towards satisfaction of a soul frustrated of its 
passion, avenging itself on the body that betrayed 
it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heath- 
cliff's; for it must get through to him. And he 
knows it. 

Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-* 
drawn accomplishment of his revenge, are subor- 
dinate to this supreme inner drama, this wearing 
down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit. 

Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heath- 
cliff is failing. *"Nelly,"' he says, ^"there's a 
strange change approaching: I'm in its shadow at 
present. I take so little interest in my daily life, 
that I hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two 
who have left the room'" (Catherine Linton and 
Hareton) *"are the only objects which retain a dis- 
tinct material appearance to me. . . . Five min- 
utes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my 
youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such a 
variety of ways that it would have been impossible 
to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, 
his startling likeness to Catherine connected him 
fearfully with her. That, however, which you may 
suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, 
is actually the least : for what is not connected with 
her to me.^ and what does not recall her.^ I cannot 



256 THE THREE BRONTES 

look down to this floor, but her features are shaped 
in the flags ! In every cloud, in every tree — fifling 
the air at night, and caught by ghmpses in every ob- 
ject by day — I am devoured with her image! The 
most ordinary faces of men and women — my own 
features — mock me with a resemblance. The en- 
tire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda 
that she did exist, and that I have lost her." . . . 
. ' " But what do you mean by a change, Mr. Heath- 
cliff.'^" I said, alarmed at his manner. . . . 

'"I shall not know till it comes," he said, "I'm 
only half conscious of it now. " ' 

A few days pass. He grows more and more ab- 
stracted and detached. One morning Nelly Dean 
finds him downstairs, risen late. 

'I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it 
nearer, and then rested his arms on the table, and 
looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed, survey- 
ing one particular portion, up and down, with glit- 
tering, restless eyes, and with such eager interest 
that he stopped breathing during half a minute 
together. . . . 

*"Mr. Heathchff! master!" I cried, "don't, for 
God's sake, stare as if you saw an unearthly vision." 

'"Don't, for God's sake, shout so loud," he re- 
plied. "Turn round, and tell me, are we by our- 
selves.'^" 

*"0f course," was my answer, "of course we 
are." 



THE THREE BRONTES 257 

* Still, I involuntarily obeyed him, as if I were not 
quite sure. With a sweep of his hand he cleared a 
space in front of the breakfast-things, and leant for- 
ward more at his ease. 

*Now I perceived that he was not looking at the 
wall; for, when I regarded him alone, it seemed ex- 
actly that he gazed at something within two yards' 
distance. And, whatever it was, it communicated, 
apparently, both pleasure and pain in exquisite ex- 
tremes : at least the anguished, yet raptured, expres- 
sion of his countenance suggested that idea. The 
fancied object was not fixed: either his eyes pur- 
sued it with unwearied diligence, and, even in 
speaking to me, were never weaned away. I vainly 
reminded him of his protracted abstinence from 
food: if he stirred to touch anything in compliance 
with my entreaties, if he stretched his hand out to 
get a piece of bread, his fingers clenched before they 
reached it, and remained on the table, forgetful of 
their aim.' 

He cannot sleep ; and at dawn of the next day he 
comes to the door of his room — Cathy's room — 
and calls Nelly to him. She remonstrates with him 
for his neglect of his body's health, and of his soul's. 

"'Your cheeks are hollow, and your eyes blood- 
shot, like a person starving with hunger, and going 
blind with loss of sleep." 

* "It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest," he 
said. . . . "I'll do both as soon as I possibly can 



258 THE THREE BRONTES 

r. . as to repenting of my injustices, I 've done no 
injustice, and I repent of nothing. I am too happy; 
and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss 
kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." ... In 
the afternoon, while Joseph and Hareton were at 
their work, he came into the kitchen again, and, 
with a wild look, bid me come and sit in the house: 
he wanted somebody with him. I declined; telling 
him plainly that his strange talk and manner fright- 
ened me, and I had neither the nerve nor the will 
to be his companion alone. 

*"I believe you think me a fiend," he said, with 
his dismal laugh: "something too horrible to live 
under a decent roof." Then, turning to Catherine, 
who was there, and who drew behind me at his ap- 
proach, he added, half sneeringly: "Will you come, 
chuck .f* I'll not hurt you. No! to you I've made 
myself worse than the devil. Well, there is one who 
won't shrink from my company! By God! she's re- 
lentless. Oh, damn it! It's unutterably too much 
for flesh and blood to bear — even mine." ' 

It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this imma- 
terial passion, the fury with which he at once 
sustains and is consumed by it, that makes him 
splendid. 

Peace under green grass could never be the end 
of Heathcliff or of such a tragedy as Wuihering 
Heights. Its real end is the tale told by the shep- 
herd whom Lockwood meets on the moor. 



THE THREE BRONTES 259 



( if 



I was going to the Grange one evening — a 
dark evening, threatening thunder — and, just at 
the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy 
with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was cry- 
ing terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skit- 
tish and would not be guided. 

*"What is the matter, my little man?" I asked. 

* ''There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, 
under t' Nab," he blubbered, "un' I darnut pass 



'em."' 



It is there, the end, in one line, charged with the 
vibration of the supernatural. One line that car- 
ries the suggestion of I know not what ghostly and 
immaterial passion and its unearthly satisfaction. 

And this book stands alone, absolutely self-begot- 
ten and self-born. It belongs to no school; it follows 
no tendency. You cannot put it into any category. 
It is not 'Realism,' it is not 'Romance,' any more 
than Jane Eyre: and if any other master's method, 
De Maupassant's or Turgeniev's, is to be the test, 
it will not stand it. There is nothing in it you can 
seize and name. You will not find in it support for 
any creed or theory. The redemption of Catherine 
Linton and Hareton is thrown in by the way in 
sheer opulence of imagination. It is not insisted 
on. Redemption is not the key-note of Wuthering 
Heights. The moral problem never entered into 
Emily Bronte's head. You may call her what you 



260 THE THREE BRONTES 

will — Pagan, pantheist, transcendentalist, mystic 
and worshipper of earth, she shps from all your 
formulas. She reveals a point of view above good 
and evil. Hers is an attitude of tolerance that is 
only not tenderness because her acceptance of life 
and of all that lives is unqualified and unstinting. 
It is too lucid and too high for pity. 

Heathcliff and Catherine exist. They justify 
their existence by their passion. But if you ask 
what is to be said for such a creature as Linton 
HeathcliflF, you will be told that he does not justify 
his existence; his existence justifies him. 

Do I despise the timid deer. 
Because his limbs are fleet with fear? 
Or, would I mock the wolf's death-howl, 
Because his form is gaunt and foul? 
Or, hear with joy the lev'ret's cry, 
Because it cannot bravely die? 
No! Then above his memory 
Let Pity's heart as tender be. 

After all it is pity; it is tenderness. 

And if Emily Bronte stands alone and is at her 
greatest in the things that none but she can do, she 
is great also in some that she may be said to share 
with other novelists; the drawing of minor charac- 
ters, for instance. Lockwood may be a little indis- 
tinct, but he is properly so, for he is not a character, 
he is a mere impersonal looker-on. But Nelly Dean, 
the chief teller of the story, preserves her rich indi- 
viduality through all the tortuous windings of the 




Ni 



^ 



W 



I 




THE THREE BRONTES 261 

tale. Joseph, the old farm-servant, the bitter, rant- 
ing Calvinist, is a masterpiece. And masterly was 
that inspiration that made Joseph chorus to a 
drama that moves above good and evil. *" Thank 
Hivin for all!'" says Joseph. *"A11 warks togither 
for gooid, to them as is chozzen and piked out fro' 
the rubbidge. Yah knaw whet t' Scripture sez.'" 
'"It's a blazing shame, that I cannot oppen t' 
blessed Book, but yah set up them glories to Sattan, 
and all t' flaysome wickednesses that iver were born 
into the warld.'" 

Charlotte Bronte said of her sister: 'Though her 
feeling for the people round her was benevolent, in- 
tercourse with them she never sought; nor, with 
very few exceptions, ever experienced . . . she 
could hear of them with interest and talk of them 
with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but 
with them she rarely exchanged a word.' And yet 
you might have said she had been listening to Jo- 
seph all her life, such is her command of his copious 
utterance : ' " Ech ! ech ! " exclaimed Joseph. " Weel 
done. Miss Cathy! weel done, Miss Cathy! How- 
siver, t' maister sail just tum'le o'er them brocken 
pots; un' then we's hear summut; we's hear how 
it's to be. Gooid-for-naught madling! ye desarve 
pining fro' this to Churstmas, flinging t' precious 
gifts o' God under fooit i' yer flaysome rages! But 
I'm mista'en if ye shew yer sperrit lang. Will 
Hathecliff bide sich bonny ways, think ye.^ I nob- 



262 THE THREE BRONTES 

but wish he may catch ye i' that plisky. I nobbut 
wish he may.'" 

Edgar Linton is weak in drawing and in colour; 
but it was well-nigh impossible to make him more 
alive beside Catherine and Heathcliff . If Emily's 
hand fails in Edgar Linton it gains strength again 
in Isabella. These two are the types of the civil- 
ised, the over-refined, the delicate wearers of silk 
and velvet, dwellers in drawing-rooms with pure 
white ceilings bordered with gold, 'with showers of 
glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the cen- 
tre.' They, as surely as the tainted Hindley, are 
bound to perish in any struggle with strong, fierce, 
primeval flesh and blood. The fatal moment in the 
tale is where the two half-savage children, Cather- 
ine and Heathcliff, come to Thrushcross Grange. 
Thrushcross Grange, with all its sickly brood, is 
doomed to go down before Wuthering Heights. But 
Thrushcross Grange is fatal to Catherine too. She 
has gone far from reality when she is dazzled by the 
glittering glass-drops and the illusion of Thrush- 
cross Grange. She has divorced her body from her 
soul for a little finer living, for a polished, a scrupu- 
lously clean, perfectly presentable husband. 

Emily Bronte shows an unerring psychology in 
her handling of the relations between Isabella and 
Catherine. It is Isabella's morbid passion for 
Heathcliff that wakes the devil in Catherine. Isa- 
bella is a sentimentalist, and she is convinced that 



THE THREE BRONTES 263 

Heathclifif would love her if Catherine would *Iet 
him.' She refuses to beheve that Heathchff is what 
he is. But Catherine, who is Heathchff, can afford 
to accuse him. '"Nelly," she says, "help me to 
convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heath- 
cliff is. . . . He 's not a rough diamond — a pearl - 
containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, 
wolfish man."' But Isabella will not believe it. 
**'Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend," she says; "he has 
an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he 
remember her.^^"' It is the same insight that made 
George Meredith represent Juliana, the sentimental 
passionist, as declaring her belief in Evan Har- 
rington's innocence while Rose Jocelyn, whose love 
is more spiritual and therefore more profoundly 
loyal, doubts. Emily Bronte, like George Mere- 
dith, saw a sensualist in every sentimentalist; and 
Isabella Linton was a little animal under her silken 
skin. She is ready to go to her end quand memey 
whatever Heathcliff is, but she tricks herself into 
believing that he is what he is not, that her sensual- 
ism may justify itself to her refinement. That is 
partly why Heathcliff, who is no sensualist, hates 
and loathes Isabella and her body. 

But there are moments when he also hates the 
body of Catherine that betrayed her. Emily Bronte 
is unswerving in her drawing of Heathcliff. It is 
of a piece with his strangeness, his unexpectedness, 
that he does not hate Edgar Linton with anything 



264 THE THREE BRONTES 

like the same intensity of hatred that he has for Isa- 
bella. And it is of a piece with his absolute fiery- 
cleanness that never for a moment does he think 
of taking the lover's obvious revenge. For it is not, 
I imagine, that Emily Bronte deliberately shirked 
the issue, or deliberately rejected it; it is that that 
issue never entered her head. Nor do I see here, 
in this abandonment of the obvious, any proof of 
the childlikeness and innocence of Emily, however 
childlike and innocent she may have been. I see 
only a tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejec- 
tion, conscious or unconscious, of an unfitting be- 
cause extraneous element. Anne, who was ten 
times more childlike and innocent than Emily, 
tackles this peculiar obviousness unashamed, be- 
cause she needed it. And because she did not need 
it, Emily let it go. 

The evil wrought by Heathcliff, like the passion 
that inspired and tortured him, is an unearthly 
thing. Charlotte showed insight when she said in 
her preface to Wuthering Heights : ' Heathcliff be- 
trays one solitary human feeling, and that is not his 
love for Catherine; which is a sentiment fierce and 
inhuman . . . the single link that connects Heath- 
cliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard 
for Hareton Earnshaw — the young man whom he 
has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for 
Nelly Dean.' But that Heathcliff is wholly inhu- 
man — *a ghoul, an afreet,' — I cannot really see. 






THE THREE BRONTES ^Q5 

Emily's psychology^ here is perforce half on the 
unearthly plane; it is above our criticism, lending 
itself to no ordinary tests. But for all his unearthli- 
ness, Heathcliff is poignantly human, from his child- 
hood when he implored Nelly Dean to make him 
* decent,' for he is 'going to be good,' to his last 
hour of piteous dependence on her. You are not 
allowed for a moment to forget, that, horrible and 
vindictive as he is, the child Heathcliff is yet a 
child. Take the scene where the boy first conceives 
his vengeance. 

' On my enquiring the subject of his thoughts, he 
answered gravely: — 

'"I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley 
back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only 
do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!" 

'"For shame, Heathcliff!" said I. "It is for God 
to punish wicked people. We should learn to for- 
give. 

'"No, God won't have the satisfaction that I 
shall," he returned. "I only wish I knew the best 
way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm 
thinking of that I don't feel pain."' 

It is very like Heathcliff. It is also pathetically 
like a child. 

In Hareton Earnshaw Emily Bronte is fairly on 
the earth all the time, and nothing could be finer 
than her handling of this half-brutalised, and wholly 
undeveloped thing, her showing of the slow dawn 



^66 THE THREE BRONTES 

of his feelings and intelligence. Her psychology is 
never psychologic. The creature reveals himself at 
each moment of his unfolding for what he is. It 
was difficult; for in his degradation he had a cer- 
tain likeness in unlikeness to the degraded Heath- 
cliff. It was Heathcliff's indomitable will that 
raised him. Hareton cannot rise without a woman's 
hand to help him. The younger Catherine again 
was difficult, because of her likeness to her mother. 
Her temper, her vanity, her headstrong trickiness 
are Catherine Earnshaw. But Catherine Linton is 
a healthy animal, incapable of superhuman passion, 
capable only (when properly chastened by advers- 
ity) of quite ordinary pity and devotion. She in- 
spires bewilderment, but terror and fascination 
never; and never the glamour, the magic evoked by 
the very name of Catherine Earnshaw. Her esca- 
pades and fantasies, recalling Catherine Earnshaw, 
are all on an attenuated scale. 

Yet Catherine Earnshaw seems now and then a 
less solid figure. That is because her strength does 
not lie in solidity at all. She is a thing of flame and 
rushing wind. One half of her is akin to the storms 
of Wuthering Heights, the other belongs to her un- 
seen abiding-place. Both sides of her are immortal. 

And they are of that immortality which is the 
spirit of place — the spirit that, more than all spir- 
its, inspired Emily Bronte. Two of Charlotte's 
books, The Professor and Villettey might have been 



THE THREE BRONTES 267 

written away from Ha worth; Emily's owes much 
of its outward character to the moors, where it was 
brought forth. Not even Charlotte could paint, 
could suggest scenery like Emily Bronte. There is 
nobody to compare with her but Thomas Hardy; 
and even he has to labour more, to put in more 
strokes, to achieve his effect. In four lines she gives 
the ^torm, the cold and savage foreground, and the 
distance of the Heights : ' One may guess the power 
of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the ex- 
cessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the 
house; and by a range of gaunt thorns, all stretch- 
ing their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the 
sun.' 

See the finish of this landscape, framed in a win- 
dow: 'They sat together in a window whose lattice 
lay back against the wall, and displayed, beyond 
the garden trees and the wild green park, the valley 
of Gimmerton, with a long line of mist winding 
nearly to its top (for very soon after you pass the 
chapel, as you may have noticed, the sough that 
runs from the marshes joins a beck which follows 
the bend of the glen). Wuthering Heights rose 
above this silvery vapour; but our old house was 
invisible; it rather dips down on the other side.' 

In six lines she can paint sound, and distance, 
and scenery, and the turn of the seasons, and the 
two magics of two atmospheres. 'Gimmerton 
chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow 



268 THE THREE BRONTES 

flow of the beck in the valley came soothingly on 
the ear. It was a sweet substitute for the yet ab- 
sent murmur of the summer foliage, which drowned 
that music about the Grange when the trees were in 
leaf. At Wuthering Heights it always sounded on 
quiet days following a great thaw or a season of 
steady rain.' 

That music is the prelude to Heathcliff's return, 
and to the passionate scene that ends in Catherine's 
death. 

And nothing could be more vivid, more concrete 
than Emily Bronte's method. Time is marked as a 
shepherd on the moors might mark it, by the move- 
ment of the sun, the moon, and the stars; by 
weather, and the passage of the seasons. Passions, 
emotions, are always presented in bodily symbols, 
by means of the bodily acts and violences they in- 
spire. The passing of the invisible is made known 
in the same manner. And the visible world moves 
and shines and darkens with an absolute illusion of 
reality. Here is a road seen between sunset and 
moonrise: * ... all that remained of day was a 
beamless amber light along the west: but I could 
see every pebble on the path, and every blade of 
grass, by the light of that splendid moon.' 

The book has faults, many and glaring faults. 
You have to read it many times before you can 
realise in the mass its amazing qualities. For it is 
probably the worst-constructed tale that ever was 



THE THREE BRONTES 269 

written, this story of two houses and of three gener- 
ations that the man Lockwood is supposed to tell. 
Not only has Lockwood to tell of things he could 
not possibly have heard and seen, but sometimes 
you get scene within vivid scene, dialogue within 
dialogue, and tale within tale, four deep. Some- 
times you are carried back in time and sometimes 
forward. You have to think hard before you know 
for certain whose wife Catherine Heathcliff really 
is. You cannot get over Lockwood's original mis- 
take. And this poor device of narrative at second- 
hand, third-hand, fourth-hand, is used to convey 
things incredible, inconceivable; all the secret, in- 
visible drama of the souls of Catherine and Heath- 
cliff, as well as whole acts of the most visible, the 
most tangible, the most direct and vivid and tu- 
multuous drama; drama so tumultuous, so vivid, 
and so direct, that by no possibility could it 
have been conveyed by any medium. It simply 
happens. 

And that is how Emily Bronte's genius triumphs 
over all her faults. It is not only that you forgive 
her faults and forget them, you are not — in the 
third reading anyhow — aware of them. They dis- 
appear, they are destroyed, they are burnt up in 
her flame, and you wonder how you ever saw them. 
All her clumsy contrivances cannot stay her course, 
or obscure her light, or quench her fire. Things hap- 
pen before your eyes, and it does not matter whether 



270 THE THREE BRONTES 

Lockwood, or Nelly Dean, or Ilc^athcliff, or Cather- 
ine, tells you of their happening. 

And yet, though Lockwood and Nelly Dean are 
the thinnest, the most transparent of j^ure medi- 
ums, tliey pr(;s(^rve their personalities throughout. 
Nelly especially. The tale only begins to move 
when Lockwood drops out and Nelly takes it up. 
At that point Emily iJronte's style becomes as- 
sured in its directness and simplicity, and thence- 
forward it never falters or changes its essential 
character. 

And it is there, first of all, in that unfaltering, 
unchanging (quality of style that she stands so far 
above her sister. She has no purple patches, no 
decorative effects. No dubiously shining rhetoric is 
hers. She does not deal in metaphors or in those 
ponderous abstractions, those dreadful second-hand 
symbolic figures — Hope, Imagination, Memory, 
and the rest of them, that move with every appear- 
ance of solidity in Charlotte's pages. There are no 
angels in her rainbows. Her 'grand style' goes 
unclothed, perfect in its naked strength, its naked 
beauty. It is not possible to praise Charlotte's 
style without reservations; it is not always possi- 
ble to give passages that illustrate her qualities 
without suppressing her defects. What was a 
pernicious habit with Charlotte, her use of words 
like 'peruse,' * indite,' * retain,' with Emily is a 
mere slip of the pen. There are only, I think, 



THE THREE BRONTES 271 

three of such slips In Wutherimj J I eights. C}j;irloU,e 
was capable of mixing her worst things with her 
best. She mixed them rriost in her dialogue, whcTc; 
sins of style are sinfuilest. It is not always possible 
to give a scene, word for word, from Charlotte's 
novels; the dramatic illusion, the illusion of reality, 
is best preserved by formidable cutting. 

Bul^not only was Family's style sinless; it is on the 
whole purest, most natural, and most inevitable in 
her dialogue; and that, although the passions she 
conceived were so tremendous, so unearthly, that 
she might have been pardonf^d if she found no 
human speech to render them. 

What is more, her dramatic instinct never fails 
her as it fails Charlott/j: over and over again. Char- 
lotte had not always the mastery and s^;lf-mastery 
tPiat, having worked a situation up to its dramatic 
climax, leaves it there. A certain obscure feeling for 
Tightness guides her in the large, striding move- 
ment of the drama; it is in the handling of the 
scenes that she collapses. She wanders from climax 
to climax; she goes hack on her own trail; she ruins 
her best effects by rcfx-tition. She has no continu- 
ous dramatic instinct; no s^^as*^.* whatever of drama- 
tic form. 

Thes^' are present somehow in Wuthennf) JI eights, 
in sj>ite of its monstroas formlessness. IZmUy may 
have had no more seaseof form for form's sake than 
Charlotte; she may have had no more dramatic in- 



272 THE THREE BRONTES' 

stinct; but she had an instinct for the ways of hu- 
man passion. She knew that passion runs its course, 
from its excitement to its climax and exhaustion. 
It has a natural beginning and a natural end. And 
so her scenes of passion follow nature. She never 
goes back on her effect, never urges passion past 
its climax, or stirs it in its exhaustion. In this she 
is a greater 'realist' than Charlotte. 

It is incredible that Wuthering Heights, or any 
line of it, any line that Emily Bronte ever wrote, 
should have passed for Charlotte's. She did things 
that Charlotte could never have done if she tried 
a thousand years, things not only incomparably 
greater, but unique. 

Yet in her life-time she was unrecognised. What 
is true of her prose is true also of her poems. They 
indeed did bring her a little praise, obscure and 
momentary. No less she was unrecognised to 
such an extent that Wuthering Heights was said 
and believed to be an immature work of Char- 
lotte's. Even after her death, her eulogist, Sydney 
Dobell, was so far from recognising her, that he 
seems to have had a lingering doubt as to Ellis 
Bell's identity until Charlotte convinced him of 
his error. 

And only the other day a bold attempt was 
made to tear from Emily Bronte the glory that 
she has won at last from time. The very latest 



THE THREE BRONTES 273 

theory,^ offered to the world as a marvellous dis- 
covery, the fruit of passionate enthusiasm and 
research, is the old, old theory that Charlotte, and 
not Emily, wrote Wuthering Heights. And Sydney 
Dobell, with his little error, is made to serve as a 
witness. In order to make out a case for Charlotte, 
the enthusiast and researcher is obliged to dis- 
parage every other work of Emily's. He leans 
rashly enough on the assumption that her * Gondal 
Chronicles' were, in their puerility, beneath con- 
tempt, still more rashly on his own opinion that she 
was no poet. 

If this were the only line he took, this amusing 
theorist might be left alone. The publication of the 
Complete Poems settles him. The value, the really 
priceless value, of his undertaking is in the long ar- 
ray of parallel passages from the prose of Charlotte 
and of Emily with which he endeavours to support 
it. For, so far from supporting it, these columns are 
the most convincing, the most direct and palpable 
refutation of his theory. If any uncritical reader 
should desire to see for himself wherein Charlotte 
and Emily Bronte differed; in what manner, with 
what incompatible qualities, and to what an im- 
measurable degree the younger sister was pre-emi- 
nent, he cannot do better than study those parallel 
passages. If ever there was a voice, a quality, an 

^ Ths Key to the Bronte Works, by J. Malham-Dembleby. See 
Appendix I. 



274 



THE THREE BRONTES 



air absolutely apart and distinct, not to be ap- 
proached by, or confounded with any other, it is 
Emily Bronte's. 

It was the glare of Charlotte's fame that caused 
in her life-time that blindness and confusion. And 
Emily, between pride and a superb indifference, 
suffered it. She withdrew, with what seemed an ob- 
stinate perversity, into her own magnificent obscur- 
ity. She never raised a hand to help herself. She 
left no record, not a note or a word to prove her 
authorship of Wuihering Heights. 

Until the appearance last year of her Complete 
Poems the world had no proof of it but Charlotte's 
statement. It was considered enough, in Charlotte's 
life-time. The world accepted her disclaimer. 

But the trouble began again after Charlotte's 
death. Emily herself had no legend; but her gen- 
ius was perpetually the prey of rumours that left 
her personality untouched. Among the many pro- 
voked by Mrs. Gaskell's Life, there was one attrib- 
uting IFw/Zimngr Heights to her brother Bran well. ^ 
Mr. Francis Grundy said that Branwell told him 
he had written Wuthering Heights. Mr, Leyland 
believed Mr. Grundy. He believed that Branwell 
was a great poet and a great novelist, and he 
wrote two solid volumes of his own in support of 
his belief. 

Nobody believes in Mr. Grundy, or in Mr. Ley- 

^ The curious will find a note on this point in Appendix H. 



THE THREE BRONTES 275 

land and his belief in Branwell now. All that can be 
said of Branwell, in understanding and extenua- 
tion, is that he would have been a great poet and a 
greater novelist if he could have had his own way. 

This having of your own way, unconsciously, un- 
deliberately, would seem to be the supreme test of 
genius. Having your own way in the teeth of cir- 
cumstances, of father and of brothers, and of aunts, 
of schoolmistresses,^ and of French professors, of 
the parish, of poverty, of public opinion and hered- 
itary disease; in the teeth of the most disastrous 
of all hindrances, duty, not neglected, but fulfilled. 
By this test the genius of Emily Bronte fairly 
flames; Charlotte's stands beside it with a face hid- 
den at times behind bruised and darkened wings. 
By this test even Anne's pale talent shows here and 
there a flicker as of fire. In all three the having of 
their own way was, after all, the great submission, 
the ultimate obedience to destiny. 

For genius like theirs is destiny. And that brings 
us back to the eternal question of the Sources. * Ex- 
perience' will not account for what was greatest 
in Charlotte. It will hardly account for what was 
least in Emily. With her only the secret, the inner- 
most experience counted. If the sources of Wuther- 
ing Heights are in the 'Gondal Poems,' the sources 
of the poems are in that experience, in the long life 
of her adventurous spirit. Her genius, like Henry 
* It was Miss Wooler who taught Charlotte to 'peruse.* 



276 THE THREE BRONTES 

Angora and Rosina and the rest of them, flew from 
the 'Palaces of Instruction.' As she was Henry 
Angora, so she was Heathcliff and Catherine Earn- 
shaw. 

It is a case of 'The Horse I rode at the Battle 
of Zamorna,' that is all. 

There has been too much talk about experience. 
What the critic, the impressionist, of the Brontes 
needs is to recover, before all things, the innocence 
of the eye. No doubt we all of us had it once, and 
can remember more or less what it was like. To 
those who have lost it I would say: Go back and 
read again Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. 

Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting 
forlornly in my father's bookshelves, I came upon a 
small shabby volume, bound in yellow linen. The 
title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that 
showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to 
a churchyard packed with tombstones, tombstones 
upright and flat, and slanting at all angles. In the 
foreground was a haycock, where the grave grass 
had been mown. I do not know how the artist, whose 
resources were of the slenderest, contrived to get 
his overwhelming but fascinating effect of moor- 
land solitude, of black-grey nakedness and abiding 
gloom. But he certainly got it and gave it. There 
was one other ] picture, representing a memorial 
tablet. 

Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, 



THE THREE BRONTES 277 

because I was mortally afraid of them; and I opened 
that book and read it through. 

I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first 
time I was in the grip of a reality more poignant 
than any that I had yet known, of a tragedy that I 
could hardly bear. I suppose I have read that book 
a score of times since then. There are pages in it 
that I shrink from approaching even now, because 
of the agony of realisation they revive. The pass- 
ing bell tolled continually in the prelude; it sounded 
at intervals throughout; it tolled again at the close. 
The refrain of *Here lie the Remains' haunted me 
like a dolorous song. It seemed to me a decorous 
and stately accompaniment to such a tale, and that 
wood-cut on the title-page a fitting ornament. I 
knew every corner of that house. I have an impres- 
sion (it is probably a wrong one) of a flagged path 
going right down from the Parsonage door through 
another door and plunging among the tombs. I saw 
six little white and wistful faces looking out of an 
upper window; I saw six little children going up 
and up a lane, and I wondered how the tiny feet 
of babies ever got so far. I saw six little Bronte 
babies lost in the spaces of the illimitable moors. 
They went over rough stones and walls and moun- 
tain torrents; their absurd petticoats were blown 
upwards by the wind, and their feet were tangled in 
the heather. They struggled and struggled, and yet 
were in an ecstasy that I could well understand. 



278 THE THREE BRONTES 

' I remember I lingered somewhat long over the 
schooldays at Cowan Bridge and that I found the 
Brussels period dull; M. Heger struck me as a tire- 
some pedant, and I wondered how Charlotte could 
ever have put up with him. There was a great deal 
about Branwell that I could not understand at all, 
and so forgot. And I skipped all the London part, 
and Charlotte's literary letters. I had a very vague 
idea of Charlotte apart from Haworth and the 
moors, from the Parsonage and the tombstones, 
from Tabby and Martha and the little black cat 
that died, from the garden where she picked the 
currants, and the quiet rooms where she wrote her 
wonderful, wonderful books. 

But, for all that skipping and forgetting, there 
stood out a vivid and ineffaceable idea of Emily; 
Emily who was tall and strong and unconquer- 
able ; Emily who loved animals, and loved the moors ; 
Emily and Keeper, that marvellous dog; Emily 
kneading bread with her book propped before her; 
Emily who was Ellis Bell, listening contemptuously 
to the reviews of Wuihering Heights; Emily stitch- 
ing at the long seam with dying fingers; and Emily 
dead, carried down the long, flagged path, with 
Keeper following in the mourner's train. 

And, all through, an invisible, intangible pres- 
ence, something mysterious, but omnipotently 
alive; something that excited these three sisters; 
something that atoned, that not only consoled for 



THE THREE BRONTES 279 

suffering and solitude and bereavement, but that 
drew its strength from these things; something that 
moved in this book like the soul of it; something 
that they called 'genius.' 

Now that, as truly as I can set it down, is the im- 
pression conveyed to a child's mind by Mrs. Gas- 
kell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. And making some 
deductions for a child's morbid attraction to tomb- 
stones, and a child's natural interest in children, it 
seems to me even now that this innocent impres- 
sion is the true one. It eliminates the inessential 
and preserves the proportions; above all, it pre- 
serves the figure of Emily Bronte, solitary and 
unique. 

Anyhow, I have never been able to get away 
from it. 



THE END 



APPENDIX I 

THE KEY TO THE BRONTE WORKS 

More than once Mr. Malham-Dembleby has approached 
us with his mysterious 'Key.' There was his 'Key to 
Jane Eyre,'' published in The Saturday Review in nine- 
teen-two; there was his 'Lifting of the Bronte Veil/ pub- 
lished in The Fortnightly Review in nineteen-seven; and 
there was the correspondence that followed. Now he 
has gathered all his evidence together into one formid- 
able book, and we are faced with what he calls his ' mirac- 
ulous and sensational' discovery that it was Charlotte 
and not Emily Bronte who wrote Wuthering Heights, and 
that in Wuthering Heights she immortalised the great 
tragic passion of her life, inspired by M. Heger, who, if 
you please, is Heathcliff. 

This is Mr. Malham-Dembleby 's most important con- 
tribution to the subject. M. Heger, Mr. Malham-Dem- 
bleby declares, was Heathcliff before he was M. Pelet, 
or Rochester, or M. Paul. And as it was Charlotte and 
not Emily who experienced passion, Charlotte alone was 
able to immortalise it. 

So much Mr. Malham-Dembleby assumes in the in- 
terests of psychology. But it is not from crude psycholog- 
ical arguments that he forges his tremendous Key. It 
is from the internal evidence of the works, supported by 
much 'sensational' matter from the outside. 

By way of internal evidence then, we have first the 
sensational discovery of a work, Gleanings in Craven, or 
The Tourists' Guide, by 'one Frederic Montagu,' pub- 



282 APPENDIX I 

lished at Skipton-in-Craven, in eighteen-thirty-eight, 
which work the author of Wuthering Heights and Jane 
Eyre must have read and drawn upon for many things, 
names (including her own pseudonym of Currer Bell), 
descriptions of scenery, local legends, as of that fairy 
Jannet, Queen of the Malhamdale Elves, who haunted 
the sources of the Aire and suggested Rochester's Queen 
of Elves, his fairy, Janet Eyre. Parallel passages are 
given showing a certain correspondence between Mon- 
tagu's traveller's tale and the opening scene of Wuthering 
Heights. Montagu goes on horseback to a solitary house, 
like Lockwood, and like Lockwood, is shown to bed, 
dreams, and is awakened by a white-faced apparition 
(his hostess, not his host) who holds a lighted candle, 
like Heathcliff, and whose features, like Heathcliff's, 
are convulsed with diabolical rage, and so on. Mr. Mal- 
ham-Dembleby, in a third parallel column, uses the 
same phrases to describe Jane Eyre's arrival at Roches- 
ter's house, her dreams, and the appearance of Roches- 
ter's mad wife at her bedside; his contention being that 
the two scenes are written by the same hand. 

All this is very curious and interesting; so far, how- 
ever, Mr. Malham - Dembleby's sensational evidence 
does no more for us than suggest that Charlotte and 
Emily may very likely have read Montagu's book. 

But the plot thickens. Mr. Malham-Dembleby first 
prints parallel passages from Montagu's book and 
Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, then, extensively, 
scene after scene from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. 

Some of these coincidences seem on the first blush of 
it remarkable, for instance, the child-phantom which ap- 
pears both to Jane Eyre and to Nelly Dean in Wuther- 
ing Heights ; or the rainy day and the fireside scene, 
which occur in the third chapter of Wuthering Heights 
and the opening chapter of Jane Eyre. Others again. 



APPENDIX I 283 

such as the parallel between the return of Heathcliff to 
Catherine and that of Jane to Rochester, will not bear 
examination for a moment. Of this and most of Mr. 
Malham-Dembleby's parallels it may be said that they 
only maintain their startling character by the process of 
tearing words from their sentences, sentences from their 
contexts, contexts from their scenes, and scenes from 
the living body of each book. Apparently to Mr. Mal- 
ham-Dembleby, a book, at any rate a Bronte book, is 
not a living body; each is a box of German bricks, and he 
takes all the boxes and tumbles them out on the floor to- 
gether and rearranges them so as to show that, after all, 
there was only one box of bricks in the family, and that 
was Charlotte's. Much of his argument and the force 
of his parallel passages depends on the identification of 
the characters in the Bronte works, not only with their 
assumed originals, but with each other. For Mr. Mal- 
ham-Dembleby's purposes poor M. Heger, a model 
already remorselessly overworked by Charlotte, has 
to sit, not only for M. Pelet, for [Rochester and Yorke 
Hunsden, for Robert and for Louis Moore, but for 
Heathcliff, and, if you would believe it, for Hareton 
Earnshaw; because (parallel passage!) the younger 
Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw were teacher and 
pupil, and so (when she taught him English) were Char- 
lotte and M. Heger. 

Mr. Malham-Dembleby's work of identification is 
made easier for him by his subsidiary discovery of Char- 
lotte's two methods. Method I, interchange of the sex; 
Method II, alteration of the age of her characters. With 
this licence almost any character may be any other. 
Thus Hareton Earnshaw looking at Catherine is Jane 
Eyre looking at Mr. Rochester. When he touches her 
Nelly Dean says, *He might have stuck a knife into her, 
she started in such a taking'; and Rochester says to 



284 APPENDIX I 

Jane *you stick a sly penknife under my ear' (parallel 
passage!). Lock wood at Wuthering Heights is Jane 
Eyre at Thornton Hall; Heathcliff appearing at Lock- 
wood's bedside, besides being M. Heger and Rochester, 
is Rochester's mad wife. Heathcliff returning to Cath- 
erine is Jane returning to Rochester, and so on. But 
however varied, however apparently discriminated the 
characters, M. Heger is in all the men, and Charlotte is 
in all the women, in the two Catherines, in Jane Eyre 
and Frances Henri; in Caroline Helstone, in Pauline 
Bassompierre and Lucy Snowe. 

Now there is a certain plausibility in this. With all 
their vividness and individuality Charlotte Bronte's 
characters have a way of shading off into each other, 
Jane has much in common with Frances and with Lucy, 
and Lucy with Pauline. Her men incline rather to one 
type, that of the masterful, arbitrary, instructive male; 
that is the type she likes best to draw. Yorke Hunsden 
in The Professor splits up into Rochester and Robert 
Moore and Mr. Yorke; and there is a certain amount of 
Paul Emanuel in all of them. But life gives us our types 
very much that way, and there is a bit of somebody else 
in everybody. It is easy to suggest identity by exagger- 
ating small points of resemblance and suppressing large 
and essential differences (which is what Mr. Malham- 
Dembleby does all the time). But take each whole liv- 
ing man and woman as they have been created for us, I 
don't care if Catherine Earnshaw and Jane Eyre did 
each have a fit of passion in a locked room, and if a serv- 
ant waited upon each with gruel; there is no earthly 
likeness between the soul of Catherine and the soul of 
Jane. I don't care if there was 'hell-light' in Rochester's 
eyes and Heathcliff's too, if they both swore by the 
'Deuce,' and had both swarthy complexions like Paul 
Emanuel; for there is a whole universe between Heath- 



APPENDIX I 285 

cliff and Rochester, between Rochester and M. Paul. 
Beside Heathcliff, that Titan raging on a mountain- 
top, M. Paul is merely a little man gesticulating on an 
estrade. 

So much for the identifications. Mr. Malham-Dem- 
bleby has been tempted to force them thus, because 
they support his theory of M. Heger and of the great 
tragic passion, as his theory, by a vicious circle, sup- 
ports his identifications. His procedure is to quote all 
the emotional passages he can lay his hands on, from the 
Poems, from Wuthering Heights, from Jane Eyre, from 
VilleUe and The Professor, * ... all her life's hope was 
torn by the roots out of her own riven and outraged 
heart . . .' {VilleUe) '. . . faith was blighted, confid- 
ence destroyed . . . ' {Jane Eyre) ' . . . Mr. Rochester * 
(M. Heger, we are informed in confidential brackets) 
was not 'what she had thought him.' Assuring us that 
Charlotte was here describing her own emotions, he 
builds his argument. 'Evidence' (the evidence of these 
passages) 'shows it was in her dark season when Char- 
lotte Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights, and that she por- 
trayed M. Heger therein with all the vindictiveness of a 
woman with "a riven, outraged heart," the wounds in 
which yet rankled sorely.' So that. Key in hand, for 
* that ghoul Heathcliff ! ' we must read * that ghoul Heger.' 
We must believe that Wuthering Heights was written in 
pure vindictiveness, and that Charlotte Bronte repudi- 
ated its authorship for three reasons: because it con- 
tained 'too humiliating a story' of her 'heart-thrall'; 
because of her subsequent remorse (proof, the modified 
animus of her portrait of M. Heger as Rochester and as 
M. Paul), and for certain sound business considerations. 
So much for internal evidence. 

Not that Mr. Malham-Dembleby relies on it alto- 
gether. He draws largely upon legend and conjecture. 



286 APPENDIX I 

and on more * sensational discoveries* of his own. He 
certainly succeeds in proving that legend and conjec- 
ture in Brussels began at a very early date. Naturally 
enough it fairly flared after the publication of Jane 
Eyre. So far there is nothing new in his discoveries. But 
he does provide a thrill when he unearths Eugene Sue's 
extinct novel of Miss Mary, ou Vlnstitutrice, and gives 
us parallel passages from that. For in Miss Mary, pub- 
lished in eighteen-fifty and 'fifty-one/ we have, not 
only character for character and scene for scene, 'lifted' 
bodily from Jane Eyre, but the situation in The Profes- 
sor and Villette is largely anticipated. We are told that] 
Eugene Sue was in Brussels in eighteen-forty-four, the 
year in which Charlotte left the Pensionnat. This is in- 
teresting. But what does it prove? Not, I think, what 
Mr. Malham-Dembleby maintains — that M. Heger 
made indiscreet revelations to Eugene Sue, but that 
Eugene Sue was an unscrupulous plagiarist who took 
his own where he found it, either in the pages of Jane 
Eyre or in the tittle-tattle of a Brussels salon. However 
indiscreet M. Heger may have been, he was a man of 
proved gravity and honour. He would at any rate have 
drawn the line at frivolous treachery. Nobody, how- 
ever, can answer for what Madame Heger and her 
friends may not have said. Which disposes of Eugene 
Sue. 

Then there is that other 'sensational discovery' of the 
Heger portrait, that little drawing (now in the National 
Portrait Gallery) of Charlotte Bronte in curls, wearing 
a green gown, and reading Shirley. It is signed Paul 
Heger, eighteen-fifty, the year of Shirley's publication, 

^ Serially in The London Journal in eighteen-fifty; in volume 
form in Paris, eighteen-fifty-one. It is possible, but not likely, 
Eugene Sue may have seen the manuscript of The Professor when 
it was 'going the round.* 



APPENDIX I 287 

and the year in which Charlotte sat to Richmond for her 
portrait. There are two inscriptions on the back: 'The 
Wearin' of the Green; First since Emily's death'; and 
below: 'This drawing is by P. Heger, done from life in 
1850.' The handwriting gives no clue. 

Mr. Malham - Dembleby attaches immense import- 
ance to this green gown, which he 'identifies' with the 
pink one worn by Lucy in Villette. He says that Lady 
Ritchie told him that Charlotte wore a green gown at 
the dinner-party Thackeray gave for her in June, eight- 
een-fifty; and when the green gown turns out after all 
to be a white one with a green pattern on it, it is all one 
to Mr. Malham-Dembleby. So much for the green 
gown. Still, gown or no gown, the portrait may be genu- 
ine. Mr. Malham-Dembleby says that it is drawn on the 
same paper as that used in Mr. George Smith's house, 
where Charlotte was staying in June, eighteen-fif ty, and 
he argues that Charlotte and M. Heger met in London 
that year, and that he then drew this portrait of her 
from the life. True, the portrait is a very creditable per- 
formance for an amateur; true, M. Heger's children 
maintained that their father did not draw, and there is 
no earthly evidence that he did; true, we have nothing 
but one person's report of another person's (a collector's) 
statement that he had obtained the portrait from the 
Heger family, a statement at variance with the evidence 
of the Heger family itself. But granted that the children 
of M. Heger were mistaken as to their father's gift, and 
that he did draw this portrait of Charlotte Bronte from 
Charlotte herself in London in eighteen-fifty, I cannot 
see that it matters a straw or helps us to the assump- 
tion of the great tragic passion which is the main sup- 
port of Mr. Malham-Dembleby 's amazing fabrication. 



APPENDIX II 

Leyland's theory is that Branwell Bronte wrote the 
first seventeen chapters of Wuihering Heights. It has 
very Httle beyond Leyland's passionate conviction to 
support it. There is a passage in a letter of Branwell's 
to Leyland, the sculptor, written in eighteen-forty-five, 
where he says he is writing a three-volume novel of 
which the first volume is completed. He compares it 
with Hamlet and with Lear. There is also Branwell's 
alleged statement to Mr. Grundy. And there is an ob- 
scure legend of manuscripts produced from Branwell's 
hat, before the eyes of Mr. Grundy, in an inn-parlour. 
Leyland argues freely from the antecedent probability 
suggested by Branwell's letters and his verse, which he 
published by way of vindication. He could hardly have 
done Branwell a worse service. Branwell's letters give 
us a vivid idea of the sort of manuscripts that would be 
produced, in inn-parlours, from his hat. As for his verse 
— that formless, fluent gush of sentimentalism — it 
might have passed as an error of his youth, but for poor 
Leyland's comments on its majesty and beauty. There 
are corpses in it and tombstones, and girls dying of tuber- 
culosis, obscured beyond recognition in a mush of verb- 
iage. There is not a live line in it. One sonnet only, out 
of Branwell's many sonnets, is fitted to survive. It has 
a certain melancholy, sentimental grace. But it is not a 
good sonnet, and it shows Branwell at his best. At his 
worst he sinks far below Charlotte at her worst, and, 
compared with Emily or with Charlotte at her best, 
Branwell is nowhere. Even Anne beats him. Her sad, 



APPENDIX II 289 

virginal restraint gives a certain form and value to her 
colourless and slender gift. 

There is a psychology of such things, as there is a psy- 
chology of works of genius. Emily Bronte's work, with 
all its faults of construction, shows one and indivisible, 
fused in one fire from first to last. One cannot take the 
first seventeen chapters of Wuthering Heights and separ- 
ate them from the rest. There is no faltering anywhere 
and no break in the power and the passion of this stu- 
pendous tale. And where passion is, sentimentalism is 
not. And there is not anywhere in Wuthering Heights a 
trace of that corruption which for the life of him Bran- 
well could not have kept out of the manuscripts he pro- 
duced from his hat. 



INDEX 



Absolute, the, xv, 205. 
Agnes Grey, 28, 29, 42. 
Augustine, St., 213. 
Austen, Jane, 137, 183. 

Ballynaskeagh, 4. 

Balzac, 48. 133, 164, 189. 

Bassompierre, Pauline de, in Villette, 
175-181. 

Being, 213, 214. 

Parmenides on, 214. 

Birrell, Mr., xii, 19, 30, 62. 

Blake, William, 203, 206. 

Branwell, Miss, at Haworth, 8, 9. 

death of, 25. 

Miss Maria, marries Rev. Pat- 
rick Bronte, 4. 

illness of, 8. 

death of, 8. 



Bronte- 

Anne, 41-51. 

13, 14. 

at Thornton, 4. 

at Haworth, 21, 28. 

at Thorp Green, 21, 22, 25, 

43-45. 

in London, 29. 

character of, 41-43, 47, 61. 

illness and death of, 35, 36. 

diary of, 22, 27. 224. 

Poems of, 49-51. 218, 288. 

novels of, 28, 41, 42, 47, 49. 

and Branwell BrontS com- 
pared, 47, 288. 

Charlotte, 51-193. 

at Thornton, 4. 

at Haworth, xiv, 4, 5, 7, 10- 

13, 18, 19, 25, 28, 37. 38, 85, 99, 
111, 113, 191, 277, 278. 

at Cowan Bridge, 9, 10. 

at Roe Head, 13, 14, 99, 100. 

at Dewsbury Moor, 14, 99. 

at Stonegappe, 14, 58-60. 



Bronte — 

Charlotte, at Rawdon. 21. 64. 
in Brussels, xiii. 23-26, 82-84, 

86-95, 286, 287. 

in London, xiii, 29, 37, 39, 287. 

marriage of, 39-41. 

death of, 40, 41. 

character of, xv, 62 et seq., 

79-98, 191-193. 
genius of, xiii, xiv, 3, 4, 6, 7, 

12, 24, 26, 82, 95, 111, 112. 146, 

147, 198, 275. 

early writings of, 107-110. 

novels of, 114-189. 

Poems of, 28, 111. 190. 

her love of children, 62-66. 

and Emily Bronte compared, 

40, 198-201, 275. 
Mr. Swinburne on, 63, 66. 



Elizabeth, 4, 9-11. 
Emily Jane, 193-279. 

at Haworth, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 21, 

24, 27-29. 

at Cowan Bridge, 9, 10. 

at Roe Head, 13, 14. 

at Halifax, 14. 

in Brussels. 23-26. 

death of, 33-35, 157, 159, 



201. 

— character of, 13, 193-201. 

— genius of. xvi. 3. 4, 198, 200- 
202, 217, 242, 243, 269, 275, 278, 
279. 

— diary of, 21, 22, 27, 224. 

— Poems of, 28, 203-242, 272, 
273. 



— novel of, 28, 242-273, 278-285. 

— mysticism of, xv, 195, 198, 
200-210, 215. 

— paganism of, xv, 153, 154, 202, 



216, 242, 250. 

— and Charlotte Bronte com- 
pared, 40, 198, 201, 275. 



292 



INDEX 



Bronte — 

Emily Jane, M. Maeterlinck on, 

xii, 197, 248. 

Mr. Swinburne on, xii, 202. 

Maria, 4, 7. 

at Cowan Bridge, 9, 10. 

character of, 9, 11. 

death of, 10, 11. 

Patrick Branwell, xiii, 4, 7, 13, 16- 

18, 23, 33, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55-57, 

230. 

at Thornton, 4. 

at Haworth, 14-18,25, 30-32. 

■ at Bradford, 14, 16. 

at Luddenden Foot, 23. 

• at Thorp Green, 30, 31. 

character of, 31-33, 42-47. 

and Mrs. Robinson, 30, 31, 

43-46. 

death of, 33. 

Poems of, 15, 32, 274, 288. 

authorship of Wuthering 



Heights ascribed to, 274, 288, 289. 
and Emily Bronte compared, 



288, 289. 

■ and Anne Bronte compared, 

47, 288. 

Patrick, Rev., 4-7, 9, 25, 26, 32, 
33, 85, 86. 

at Thornton, 4. 

at Haworth, 4. 

in Ireland, 4. 

character of, 4-7, 9. 

works of, 7. 

Brontes, The, Fact and Fiction, by 

Angus Mackay, 83. 
Brown, John, 15-17, 44. 
Brussels, Charlotte Bronte in, xiii, 

23-26, 86-95, 182, 286. 

Emily Bronte in, 23-26. 

Influence of, xiii, 86-95, 182. 

Byron, 133, 239. 

Children, love of, 61-66, 179. 

in Charlotte Bronte's novels, 

63-66, 179. 

in George Eliot's novels, 61, 179. 

Cowan Bridge School, 9, 10, 13, 95. 
Creative Impulse, the, 7, 178, 181. 



Criticism of Charlotte Brontg, 19, 
20, 61-74, 79-82, 129, 133, 135. 

of Jane Eyre, 129-145. 

of Shirley, 61, 66, 155, 156, 162. 

of Villette, 163-170, 175-185, 

189. 

of Emma, 186. 

of Charlotte Bronte's Poems, 



190. 

— of Emily Bronte's Poems, 203- 
243. 

— of Wuthering Heights, 243-273. 

— of Agnes Grey, 41, 42. 

— of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 



48, 49. 

of Anne Bronte's Poems, 49-51, 

218, 288. 

Dean, Nelly, in Wuthering Heights, 

249. 263, 264, 270. 
Destiny, 24, 25, 26, 28, 39, 113, 275. 
Destiny, Wisdom and, 197, 248. 
Dewsbury, Charlotte Bronte at, 14, 

99. 
Dialogue, 128, 129, 157, 158, 169, 271. 
Diary, Emily Bronte's, 21, 22, 27, 

194, 224. 
Anne Bronte's, 22, 27, 224. 



Dickens, 137. 

Diranet, M., xiii, xv, 43, 44, 189. 

his criticism of Charlotte 

Bronte, xiii. 
his criticism of Wuther- 



ing Heights, xv. 
Dobell, Sydney, on Emily Bronte, 

272, 273. 
Dramatic instinct of Charlotte 

Bronte, 188, 271, 272. 
Dramatic instinct of Emily Bronte, 

271, 272. 
Duclaux, Madame, xii, xiii, 57, 133. 
her Emily Bronte, xii, 5, 

35. 43, 193, 211. 
on Wuthering Heights, 246, 



247. 
Dunton, Mr. Theodore Watts-, xii. 

Earnshaw, Catherine, 242-266. 
character of, 247-251, 266. 



INDEX 



9,93 



Earnshaw, Hareton, 244, 245, 247. 

character of, 251, 265, 266. 

Earth, the. 141, 153, 154, 162, 202, 

203, 241-243, 251, 252. 
Emily Bronte's love of, 153, 154, 

202, 241-243, 259, 260. 

Genius of, 203. 

Poem to, 241. 

Ecstasy, 207. 

Eliot, George, 61, 163, 179, 198. 

Emanuel, Paul, 113, 164-173, 175, 

284, 285. 
Emma, Fragment of, 186-187. 
Expenence, 164 et seq., 197, 198, 275. 
novel of, 115, 116, 164-168, 189. 

how far important, 164, 165, 

168, 276. 

of Charlotte Bronte, 145, 146, 

147, 200. 276. 
Eyre, name whence derived, 282. 

Fanshawe, Ginevra, character of, 

183, 184. 
Fielding. 137. 

Gaskell, Mrs., 4, 5. 6, 33, 38, 43, 44, 
47, 52, 64, 65, 102, 108, 133, 163, 
193. 

Gaskell's, Mrs., Life of Charlotte 
Bronte, 38, 52, 276-279. 

Genius, 275, 279. 

of Charlotte Bronte, xiii, xiv, 

3, 4, 6, 12, 24, 26, 81, 95, 111, 112, 
146, 147, 198, 275. 

of Emily Bronte, xvi, 3, 4, 198, 

200, 201, 217, 242, 269, 274, 275. 

the, of Place, 3, 4, 266, 267. 

the, of Earth, 203, 204. 

test of, 275. 



Heathcliff, character of, 244-249, 260. 

and Zamorna, 234-240. 

Heger, M. Constantin, xiii, 23, 25, 

82-95. 
character of, 92, 93, 166, 

167. 
influence of, 26, 106, 107, 

110-114. 
relations with Charlotte Bronte, 



xiii, 82-95, 102-106. Ill, 114. 145, 

281-287. 
original of Paul Emanuel, 

113, 164-170, 281-287. 
— Madame, 25, 89-93, 112, 169. 
original of Madame Beck, 



'Gondal Chronicles,' 28, 224, 225, 
273. 

Poems,' xvi, 225-243, 275. 

Grundy, Francis, 21, 44, 55, 274, 288. 

Haworth, xiv, 3, 4, 7, 15, 26, 39, 196. 
influence of, 3, 18, 28, 38, 99, 

111, 113, 192, 193, 267, 276. 277. 
Heathcliff, 225, 236, 238-240, 244- 

270. 



164, 169. 

Helstone, Caroline, 156, 158. 159, 
161, 162. 

and Miss Ellen Nussey, 71, 



72. 103-105. 
Henri, Frances, 117-120. 
Heredity, 246, 247. 

Imagination and the real, 146, 163. 

Jane Eyre. 28, 29. 61,93, 95,103, 104, 
106, 114. 120-148. 150, 156-160. 
163, 183. 281-286. 

dialogue in. 128. 

criticisms of, 122, 123, 128- 



136. 



138. 



passion in, 128, 129, 137, 

reality of, 123, 138. 

style in. 143-145. 

— and The Professor com- 
pared. 114. 121-123, 163. 

and Shirley compared. 148. 

and Villette compared, 163, 



183. 
quoted, 125-128, 130-132, 

140, 141. 
John of the Cross, St., 209. 

Lang, Andrew, 135. 

Letters of Charlotte Bronte, 85, 36, 

46, 73, 74, 86. 191. 
to Miss Ellen Nussey, 38, 



74-78, 86, 97-101. 



294 



INDEX 



Letters of Charlotte BrontS from 

Brussels, 86-89. 

to M. Heger, 94. 

to Southey, 105, 106. 

to Wordsworth, 105, 106. 

Leyland, Francis A., 55, 56. 
on Branwell Bronte, 83, 

274, 288. 

the sculptor, 16, 44, 288. 

Lewes, George Henry, 20, 133, 138. 

on Shirley, 66. 

Life of Charlotte Bronte, Mrs. Gas- 

kell's, xii. 38, 52, 276, 279. 
Linton, Catherine, 247, 259, 266. 
London, Charlotte Bronte in, xiv, 

29, 37, 38, 57, 287. 

Mackat, Mb. Angus, 83. 
Maeterlinck, M., on Emily Brontg, 

xii, 197, 248. 
Malham-Dembleby, Mr. J., 273, 

281-287. 
Marriage of Charlotte Bronte, 39-41. 
Charlotte Bronte on, 68-81, 160, 

161. 
Meredith, George, 150, 263. 
Moore, Louis, 159. 

Robert, 156, 159, 283. 

Motherhood, 62-66. 

Mysticism, xv, 195, 198, 201-210, 215. 

Nature in Shirley, 153-155. 

in Wuthering Heights, 201. 

in Emily Bronte's Poems, 241, 

242. 

Nicholls, Rev. Arthur Bell, 39-41, 84. 

Nicoll, Sir William Robertson, xii, 
211, 219, 221. 

Note on Charlotte Bronte, by Al- 
gernon Charles Swinburne, xii, 61, 
202. 

Novel, the, 188. 

Novels of Charlotte Bront6, 114-189. 

Anne Brontg, 41, 42, 48, 49. 

Emily Brontg, 242-275. 

Nussey. Miss Ellen, 13, 37, 53, 71, 
72, 74-77, 85, 195. 

■ Charlotte Bronte's friend- 
ship with, 95-105. 



Nussey, Misa Ellen, Charlotte 
BrontS's letters to, 38, 74-77, 86, 
96-105. 

Charlotte Bronte's ad- 
vice to, 74-77, 86. 

influence of, 97-100. 

Rev. Henry, 80. 

original of St. John Rivers, 

96. 166. 

Oliphant, Mrs. on Charlotte 
Bronte, 19-21, 62, 67-74, 79, 80, 
129. 

on Shirley, 68, 69, 161-163. 



Paganism, Emily Bronte's, xv, 153, 
155, 201, 209, 210, 216. 260. 

in Wuthering Heights, 243, 250. 

Pantheism, Emily Bronte's, 198, 213. 

Parmenides, Poem on Nature, 214. 

Passion, Charlotte Bronte's treat- 
ment of, 114, 115, 127-129, 199. 

Emily Bronte's treatment of, 

199, 248, 249. , 

Dickens' treatment of, 137. 

Fielding's treatment of, 137, 

Jane Austen's treatment of. 



137. 



— Smollett's treatment of, 137. 

— Thackeray's treatment of, 137. 

— in Jane Eyre, 126, 127, 137-139, 
141, 148. 

— in Shirley, 148, 159. 

— in Villette, 184. 

— in Wuthering Heights, 243, 247- 



249, 253. 259, 260, 262, 263. 

— in Emily Bronte's Poems, 208- 
210, 227, 232. 238, 242. 

— in Emily Bronte's soul, 196-198, 



199, 243. 

test of reality, 183. 

'Philosopher, The,' 205-206. 
Philosophy, Emily Bronte's, 198, 205. 
Pictures of the Past, by Francis 

Grundy, 55. 
Poems of Anne Bronte, 28, 49-51, 

218, 288. 
of Branwell Bronte, 15, 32, 274, 



288. 



INDEX 



295 



Poems of Charlotte Brontg, 28, 110, 

190, 288. 
of Emily Bronte, 27, 28, 203- 

243, 272. 
The Complete, of Emily Bronte, 

216 et seq.. 273. 
'Poems, Gondal,' xvi, 225-240. 
Professor, The. 93, 114-122, 157, 284, 

285. 
and Jane Eyre compared, 

114, 115, 121-123, 163. 

• and Villette compared, 114, 



115, 120, 121. 
quoted, 118-120. 



Pryor, Mrs. 159. 

Quarterly Review, The, on Jane Eyre, 
46, 129, 133-135, 148. 

Real, the, 156, 195, 198. 

Imagination and the, 146, 163, 

164. 

germ of the, 165, 182, 200, 202. 

Realism, 188, 259. 

Reality, 123, 138, 156, 160, 163-169, 

182-184, 189, 198, 202, 205, 268, 

271. 
Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, 102, 106. 
on Charlotte Bronte, 52- 

55. 

quoted, 53-55. 

Rigby, Miss (Lady Eastlake), 136. 
Rivers, St. John. 96, 166. 
Robinson, Miss A. Mary F. See Du- 

claux, Madame. 

Mrs., 43-45. 

and Branwell Bronte, xiii, 

31, 32, 43-45. 
vindicated, 31, 43-45. 



Rochester, character of, 123-134, 

139-141, 159, 160, 281-285. 
Roe Head, 13, 14, 99, 100, 187. 

SiDGWicK, Mr., 14, 60. 

Mrs., 14, 58-60. 

Shirley, 37, 38, 66, 68, 120, 138, 148- 

162. 
portrait of Emily Bronte in, 

68, 70, 150, 155, 167. ' 



Shirley, dialogue in, 157-159. 

criticism of, 61, 66, 156-158. .| 

style in, 156-158. 

Woman in, 68, 69, 148, 149, 155, 

159, 161. 
and Jane Eyre compared, 156, 

158, 169. 
and Villette compared, 120, 163, 

169, 183, 184. 
and Wuihering Heights com- 
pared, 157, 158. 
quoted, 151, 152, 154, 155, 157- 

159. 
Shorter, Mr. Clement K., xi, xii, 73, 

74, 84, 90, 92, 216-219, 221. See 

also Prefatory Note. 
Smith, Mr. George, 30, 164, 182. 
Smollett, 137. 
Snowe, Lucy, 69, 93. 180. 
and Pauline de Bassom- 

pierre, 175-177. 
Sources of Wuihering Heights, xvi, 

227-242. 273. 
Southey, Robert, Charlotte Bronte's 

letter to, 106. 
Southey's, Robert, advice to Char- 
lotte Bronte, 106. 
Stephen, Mr. Leslie, 58, 59, 80. 
Style, 108, 110, 111, 116, 143, 184- 

186. 270. 271. 273. 
Sue, Eugene, 286. 
Supernatural, the, in Wuihering 

Heights, xv, 246, 242-259. 
Swinburne, Mr., on Charlotte Bronte, 

xii, 57, 61, 63. 
on Emily Bronte, xii, 202. 



Taylor, Miss Mart, xiv, 24, 52, 95. 
96, 100, 104. 

Mr. Joe, 71. 

Mr. James, 71, 72, 81, 165. 



Temperament, Charlotte Bronte's, 

76, 82. 
Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 28, 48, 49. 

audacity of, 48. 

realism of, 48. 

and Farrar's Eternal Hope, 



49. 
Thackeray, xiv, 37, 38, 48, 57. 



296 



INDEX 



Theories, xv, xvi, 51-95, 106, 114, 

115, 273-275, 281-289. 
Thornton, 4. 
Villette. 38, 93, 114, 163-189. 

Lucy Snowe in, 70, 93, 176-182. 

M.Paul in. See Emanuel, Paul. 

dialogue in, 170-175. 

germ of the real in, 165, 182. 

reality of, 163-169, 183, 189. 

realism of, 189. 

style in. 184-186. 

and The Professor compared, 

114, 115, 121. 
and Jane Eyre compared, 163, 



164, 183. 

and Shirley, 120, 163, 169, 183. 

quoted, 170-178, 180. 

Wabd, Mrs. Humphry, xii, 227. 
Williams, Mr. W. S.. 30. 
Charlotte Bronte's letter 

to, 78, 79. 
Wilson, Rev. Cams, 10. 
Wisdom and Destiny quoted, 197, 

248. 
Woman, 67-70, 129, 130, 148-150, 

153, 154, 160-162. 



Woman, mid- Victorian, 70, 130, 149. 

modern, 150. 

Woman's place in the world, 78, 79, 

160, 161. 
Women, Charlotte Bronte's, 67-79, 

149, 150. 
Wooler, Miss, 13, 23, 104, 211. 
Wordsworth, 106. 
Wuthering Heights, 28, 29, 38, 113, 

141, 146, 147, 200, 201, 242-275. 

criticism of, 243-272. 

dialogue in, 269, 271. 

mysticism in, 202. 

paganism in, 243, 246, 251, 

260. 
passion in, 243, 245, 250, 

255, 258-260, 264. 

realism of, 259, 269. 

style in, 270, 271. 

the supernatural in, xv, 

246, 252-259. 
sources of, xvi, 227-243, 



275. 

Zamorna, 233-240. 

See Heathcliff. 

See 'Gondal Poems.* 



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